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“Home is where you feel a welcome”:

Homemaking as National Belonging in 20th and 21st c. Black British Novels

A dissertation submitted by

Cornelia C. Photopoulos

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

English (PhD)

Tufts University

February 2020

Advisor: Modhumita Roy

Abstract

In “Home is where you feel a welcome”: Homemaking as National

Belonging in 20th and 21st c. Black British Novels, I argue that through

depictions of homemaking, black British novelists reflect and refract the

possibilities for black British national belonging. I draw on Benedict Anderson’s

foundational work Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread

of Nationalism, which has continued to provide a theoretical structure for

understanding the nation as an ideological construct since its publication in 1983.

Anderson argues that the nation as idea is disseminated through media; the

cultivation of interpersonal ties within a shared locality, formerly the organizing

principle of politics, is replaced by a collection of remotely disseminated national

narratives.

In this project, I expand upon, and challenge, Anderson’s formulation.

Through their representations of homemaking, Joan Riley, Sam Selvon, Caryl

Phillips, Andrea Levy, Bernardine Evaristo, and Zadie Smith produce narratives

about Britain and black Britain, and thus imagine community in accordance with

Anderson’s paradigm. However, the trope of homemaking, which centers the

physicality of spatiality and embodiment, reflects the importance of the material

to national belonging, refuting the notion that imagination alone can create or

sustain the nation. The metaphor of the nation as “home” is continually

complicated by the materiality of the house and its inhabitants. The implicitly

white imperial British national imaginary that positioned England as “home” did

iii

not make ideological space for people of color, and often actively excluded them.

The narrowness of the British national narrative in turn manifested in the real

struggle for housing faced by black subjects in the United Kingdom. By

foregrounding the irreducibly physical practice of homemaking, I argue that black

British novelists are both asserting themselves as creators of the British national

imaginary, and also demonstrating how the rhetoric of national belonging fails to

contend with the embodied experience of belonging that the raced, classed and

gendered practice of homemaking describes.

Acknowledgements

I would first like to thank my committee members, Sonia Hofkosh, H.

Adlai Murdoch, and Nicole Aljoe, for their participation in my defense and for the

productive feedback they provided. Their thoughtful and engaged commentary

has given me much to think about as I continue to develop the ideas this project

explores, for which I am grateful.

I am also grateful for the support of my peers throughout graduate school.

In particular, thanks to Shannon, Asha, Brad, and especially Gayathri for

providing feedback on chapter drafts. Thanks to Margaret for much-needed coffee

and conversation. Beyond the English department, Yara and Alexa were always

there for moral support.

Many thanks to my advisor, Modhumita Roy, for her support and

guidance throughout my graduate career. Despite the unforeseen obstacles that

popped up throughout the course of writing this dissertation, nevertheless, we

persisted. My writing has been much improved, and my thinking better informed

by the comments and conversations exchanged throughout this project. I would

certainly never have been able to go it alone, and I am glad that I did not have to.

Finally, I would like to thank my parents, Harry and Barbara Photopoulos,

without whose support my completion of the PhD would not have been possible.

Table of Contents

Introduction: “Home is where you feel a welcome”: Homemaking as National

Belonging in 20th and 21st c. Black British Novels

1-50

Chapter 1: Inhabiting the Body as Owning Home: Gendered Embodiment and

Home Ownership in Joan Riley’s Waiting in the Twilight and Samuel Selvon’s

Moses Ascending

51-97

Chapter 2: Windrush Subjects: Marriage, Middleclassness, and Domesticity as

National (Un)Belonging in Caryl Phillips’ The Final Passage and Andrea Levy’s

Small Island

98-140

Chapter 3: Purchasing Propriety: Gentrification and Belonging in Bernardine

Evaristo’s Mr. Loverman and Zadie Smith’s NW

141-191

Conclusion

192-200

Bibliography

201-222

Introduction: “Home is where you feel a welcome”: Homemaking as National

Belonging in 20th and 21st c. Black British Novels

In embarking on this project many years ago, I began with the idea that the

affective dimension of home as a place of comfort and belonging was at odds with

the pragmatic realities of inhabiting a house. My observation of the disjunction

between the ideal of home and the reality of housing arose during a seminar on

black British novels. I began to notice common tropes in representations of black

Caribbean migrants moving into houses in London. The carefully catalogued

disrepair of the properties available, and the understandable dismay exhibited by

the characters upon realizing how different their lives in London would be from

what they had imagined back home, seemed to constitute shared conventions of

what we could call “arrival literature.”

In each novel I discuss, house and

housing are used to represent both the material reality that black British characters

face in inhabiting the racist social landscape of England, and the metaphorical

place they occupy as British subjects who find themselves unwelcome in a place

that they had been encouraged to think of as home. Representations of characters’

experience in these novels draw on the historical record: when black British

subjects from the Caribbean migrated to England post-World War II, they found

that they were suddenly seen as black, not British. The illusion of imperial

belonging, promulgated in order to keep colonial subjects placated with the

knowledge that they were important contributors to a powerful global force,

The depiction of migrants’ arrival in the UK is a common trope in black British

literature, of which Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) is perhaps the

most iconic example.

proved to be a lie. The national imaginary of empire expanded and contracted

depending on one’s race and place, and this shifting definition manifested most

forcefully in housing discrimination.

As I argue in this dissertation, the practices of shaping the national

imaginary through the inclusion or exclusion of subjects spatially is intimately

interconnected with media dissemination of ideas about the nation. Framing

immigration policy in terms of its connection to housing insufficiency positions

migration as a proxy for race, and presents the exclusion of black British subjects

as justifiable on the pretext that there is simply not enough space for them in

England: they would be better off going back “home.” The imperial British

national imaginary presented itself as one big happy family when people of color

kept to their respective colonial places, but became inhospitable when they

migrated to the imperial center, which was imagined as white. Black Britons’

difficulties accessing housing has, therefore, been used by black British writers to

represent the inability to be ‘at home’ in empire and its aftermath.

I analyze six black British novels written between 1975 and 2014, all of

which explore the idea of national belonging through representations of

homemaking and homeownership in London. The novels I consider are Joan

Riley’s Waiting in the Twilight (1987), Sam Selvon’s Moses Ascending (1975),

Caryl Phillips’ A Final Passage (1985), Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004),

Bernardine Evaristo’s Mr. Loverman (2014), and Zadie Smith’s NW (2012). The

list is representative rather than exhaustive: in each of these novels, a black

protagonist attempts homemaking in London, the heart of the former British

Empire.

I ask how, and why, these characters succeed or fail in their quest for

national belonging, and why domestic space is the arena in which they pursue it.

Because “home” conjoins materiality and affect, homemaking as a practice

involves both making do with material circumstances, and striving toward

aspirational ideals. The barriers to homemaking and homeownership, as the

novels show us, are manifold, and include factors such as institutional racism,

sexism, and financial inequity, amongst others. Added to these is an issue I will

explore in greater depth, especially in the last chapter: the turn away from the very

idea of housing as a social good to which citizens have a fundamental right,

toward the embrace of private property ownership. This crucial ideological shift

began under Margaret Thatcher and becomes “common sense” (Harvey, 39)

under New Labour and Tony Blair.

These novels thus chart, with varying degrees

of criticism or acceptance, the rise of neoliberalism’s valorization of privatization,

particularly private property, transforming “homes” into economic assets.

I restrict my focus to novels of homemaking in London, and to characters

of Caribbean heritage, rather than of South Asian or African descent. Though

some of the same issues of finding a place to live in the UK could apply broadly

to all migrants and their descendants, the West Indian instance is of particular

relevance in exposing the racism of the British national imaginary. As Dilip Hiro,

among others, have noted, Caribbean subjects who arrived in Britain carried with

them a shared sense of British identity, based on a common language, religious

Smith’s Natalie is an exception, having been born in the UK.

I draw on David Harvey’s use of Antonio Gramsci’s concept of “common

sense,” referring to those implicit, deeply rooted beliefs that circulate

unchallenged, to describe neoliberalism’s rise in A Brief History of Neoliberalism.

practices, clothing styles, and educational system. This was in contrast to South

Asian subjects, for example, who were always already positioned as foreigners as

a result of their distinctive language and religious-cultural practices.

Caribbean

subjects’ experience of rejection by white British society, despite having such

cultural touchstones in common, reveals the importance of structural racism to the

formation of white British national identity in the UK. Though Commonwealth

subjects from across the empire experienced rejection and disappointment in

arriving in the UK, the focus on this particular collection of novels representing

the experience of Anglo-Caribbean characters highlights the way that the ideology

of racism, despite shared culture, produces social exclusion.

The history of postwar migration from the Caribbean colonies to the

United Kingdom, emblematized in the docking of the SS Empire Windrush in

June 1948, underwrites the depictions of homemaking and belonging in these

novels, as the arrival of the Windrush and the story of the “Windrush generation”

have framed the discourse on race and national identity in the UK for the past

seventy years.

Each of the central characters in these novels attempt (with

uneven success, as we shall see), to belong fully to the “motherland” through the

See Dilip Hiro, Black British, White British, Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips’

Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-racial Britain.

See Malpass, Housing and the Welfare State, Ch. 9, on social exclusion in

housing.

Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips’ Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-

racial Britain exemplifies the genre of Windrush narrative that positions it as the

foundational black British origin story, while scholarship such as Matthew

Mead’s “Empire Windrush: the Cultural Memory of an Imaginary Arrival,” and J.

Dillon Brown and Leah Reade Rosenberg’s Beyond Windrush: Rethinking

Postwar Anglophone Caribbean Literature complicate the historical and literary

dominance exercised by canonical readings of the Windrush era and its

aftereffects.

desire not only to make, but own, a home in London. Thus, in these novels, the

search for housing, and especially the barriers to accessing it, illustrate how the

conflict between belonging and alienation converges in domestic space, and how

domestic space stands in for the nation as a whole. Ideas of home and community

necessarily involve both spatial and affective and affective forms of belonging

and exclusion, and erect borders between the included and the excluded.

In each

of these novels, housing is the place where the material realities of economic

resources and government policy clash with the affective ideals of homemaking.

The quest for housing represents the material reality that black British subjects

faced in inhabiting the racist social landscape in England; it is also the

metaphorical space in which questions of belonging and identity are negotiated.

The intimate space of the home, often thought of as the quintessence of the

private sphere, is in fact a political space where gender, race, and class positions

intersect, as my analysis of these novels illustrates.

Black British Literature

Black presence – including black literary presence – in Britain can be

traced back to at least the eighteenth century in Britain, as works by Olaudah

Equiano and Ignatius Sancho attest.

However, the category “black British

literature” is a more recent phenomenon. In the past three decades, much of the

See Talja Blokland, Community as Urban Practice, and Miranda Joseph,

Against the Romance of Community, on how boundary-setting and exclusion

shape community formation.

See Innes, A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain, 2nd ed., and Gerzina,

Black London.

focus within what is categorized as black British writing has been quite rightly on

the issues of racism and exclusion from the national imaginary, most succinctly

captured in Paul Gilroy’s influential work There Ain’t No Black in the Union

Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (1987). Though the 1980s saw the

publication of David Dabydeen and Nana Wilson-Tagoe’s A Reader’s Guide to

West Indian and Black British Literature (1987) that same year, in which the

authors begin to shape black British literature as distinct from the earlier

designation of West Indian literature, it is in the 1990s and early 2000s that this

terminology begins to gain traction. Following the 1998 anniversary and

commemoration of the Windrush arrival, the early twenty-first century saw a

spate of scholarly work that developed, and even canonized, black British

literature as a category.

Anthologies such as James Proctor’s Writing Black

Britain 1948–1998: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (2000), which explicitly

marks the Windrush arrival and its fiftieth anniversary, posited it as the period

during which literary work produced black Britain. Collections that followed,

such as Kadija Sesay’s Write Black, Write British: From Post-colonial to Black

British Literature (2005), J. Victoria Arana and Lauri Ramey’s Black British

Writing (2004), Gail Low and Marion Wynne-Davies’ A Black British Canon?

(2006) continued the project of canon formation, as has Alison Donnell’s

Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture (2006) which added to black

British cultural studies scholarship.

Some such texts include Tony Sewell’s Keep on Moving: the Windrush Legacy:

the Black Experience in Britain from 1948, Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips’

Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-racial Britain, Onyekachi Wambu et.

al.’s Empire Windrush: Fifty Years of Writing about Black Britain.

Of particular note for my argument are Mark Stein’s Black British

Literature: Novels of Transformation (2004) and James Proctor’s Dwelling

Places: Postwar Black British Writing (2007), which identify themes of home,

national belonging and identity formation as foundational topics in black British

literary studies. While these works emphasize Britishness, and thus national

belonging, other scholars resist reinscribing national boundaries. Carole Boyce

Davies’s Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight Zones (2013) and H. Adlai

Murdoch’s Creolizing the Metropole: Migrant Caribbean Identities in Literature

and Film (2012) focus on how the inherently diasporic nature of Caribbean

identity, from which black Britishness has evolved, resists containment within the

nationstate: as Murdoch asks, in reflecting on the mutability of boundaries of

geography and identity, “are we being confronted with narratives of Englishness

or of Caribbeanness?” (Murdoch, 81). Most recently, Deirdre Osborne’s The

Cambridge Companion to Black British and British Asian Literature, (1945–

2010) (2016) has continued to develop, define, and challenge the very category

“black British” by linking it to the adjacent, but distinct, category of British Asian

literature.

While scholars and activists continue to debate the scope and boundary of

the category “black British literature,” it is generally understood to be literature

produced by writers of African and Afro-Caribbean descent, living and working

in Britain. The use of “black” as an anti-racist term of political solidarity under

which all people of color organized in the 1970s and 80s subsequently began to

unravel, to be largely replaced by terms that emphasized ethnic identity. By the

1990s, “black” came to signify specifically racialized African heritage, having

shed its previous, more inclusive, political meaning. All of these identity

categories – black, British, Asian –were, and are, highly contested, and the

problematization of these terms has been part of black British literature since the

category was first introduced.

Although terms such as “black” and “British”

have been seen as artificially limiting by some, “black” and “black British” have

endured in part as a defiance of the identification of British culture with

whiteness, and a rebuttal to the restrictive definition of white English identity

championed by conservative politicians such as Enoch Powell and Margaret

Thatcher. Viewing black British literature as a distinct literary category explicitly

valorizes it and positions its authors as co-creators of the British national

imaginary. This is a crucial move at a time when the reality of Britain as a

“modern multicultural nation state shaped by the ethnic diversity of citizenry” is

at odds with “a social context where Britain’s political, educational, commercial

and arts institutions today continue to display little ethnic and racial diversity”

(Osborne, 1).

While, in one sense “black British” stands as a rebuke to and a revision of

the British literary canon, it is by no means a monolithic category, and has been

debated from the beginning. David Dabydeen and Nana Wilson-Tagoe’s

See Osborne, 9.

Osborne also highlights Heidi Safia Mirza, Joan Anim-Addo, and Les Back’s

concerns that the inclusion of black British literature within official cultural

institutions opens up the category to intellectual colonization by white critics and

scholars who then assert mastery over the corpus. As a white scholar engaging

with works written by people of color, I acknowledge this danger and hope to

avoid it by eschewing any pretenses of authority or advocacy in relation to the

works I discuss and their authors.

foundational contribution to the development of black British literature, A

Reader’s Guide to West Indian and Black British Literature (1987) define black

British literature as “created and published in Britain, largely for a British

audience, by black writers either born in Britain or who have spent a major

portion of their lives in Britain” (Dabydeen and Wilson-Tagoe, 10). They

immediately problematize the term “black,” asking if it “denote[s] colour of skin

or quality of mind?” (11). Further, they ask how either of these attributes would

be determined, or what their potential bearing on literary production would be.

The term “British” is likewise problematized, and left unresolved. In a

parenthetical aside, the editors note that they include only “writers of West Indian

parentage” (11); Asian-heritage writers are excluded for considerations of space,

while writers of African descent are not even mentioned. However, the

organization of the volume reveals the difficulty in disentangling the various

imperial threads interwoven in the Caribbean context. The first section of the

book, “West Indian Literature,” includes writers of South Asian heritage, such as

such as Sam Selvon and V.S. Naipaul, alongside George Lamming, Erna Brodber,

Olive Senior, Paule Marshall, Roger Mais, Earl Lovelace. That Selvon and

Naipaul are included in the category of West Indian writers – and that they have,

respectively, been categorized as black British and British writers, illustrates the

elasticity and permeability of these literary categories. This slippage between

West Indian and black British literature as categories so closely linked they are

often conflated has been addressed by other scholars in decades since, as Osborne

notes in her explanation of the distinction between black British and British Asian

in her introduction.

The pairing of West Indian and black British literature in Dabydeen and

Wilson-Tagoe’s anthology is more than simply a logistical convenience; rather,

the pairing inaugurates an understanding of black British literature as

fundamentally rooted in the specifically West Indian history of colonialism and

migration. For Dabydeen and Wilson-Tagoe, while “blackness” has to be

understood in a context that dates back to the beginning of the imperial project

and therefore to the Shakespearean era, it is the experience of migration in the

twentieth century that constitutes the foundational narrative of black British

literature. Their opening sentence of the section on black British literature

succinctly establishes what have become the canonical tropes of migration and

homecoming: “In June 1948 the SS Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, and 492

Jamaicans disembarked upon England, their Motherland […] The Empire was

coming ‘home’, claiming their rights of abode as British citizens holding British

passports” (Dabydeen and Wilson-Tagoe, 79).

The fetishization of this particular moment of arrival, along with the

imperial relationship that positioned England as both the “Motherland” and

“home” of the colonies, are all features that would become part of the black

British literary canon. These themes of migration and arrival, the assumption of

shared imperial identity with the colonial home or Motherland, and the shock of

rejection by and alienation from white society, noted as generic features in

Dabydeen and Wilson-Tagoe’s volume, indeed are common features of much

black British literature and are certainly useful for the texts I have selected for

analysis.

Though the Windrush arrival has become an iconic feature of black British

literature, the editors of Beyond Windrush: Rethinking Postwar Anglophone

Caribbean Literature caution that the “Windrush era, in becoming the

predominant origin myth of Anglophone Caribbean literature, has become

somewhat ossified in the critical imagination” (Brown and Rosenberg, 18). If,

“[i]n contemporary Britain, “Windrush” stands metonymically as a marker for the

emergence of an increasingly multicultural national polity, in which the old self-

understanding of Englishness as racially white gradually cedes prominence to a

newer conception of Britishness” (1), Brown and Rosenberg ask what the focus

on Windrush generation, as a foundational event in black British history, and as a

descriptor for a literary genre, itself excludes.

In using the term “black British literature” in this dissertation, I am

necessarily entering into ongoing debates surrounding the category. My use

exceeds the definition given in The Cambridge Companion to Black British and

British Asian Literature (1945–2010), which restricts that term to writers of

Caribbean and African descent born in the UK. Joan Riley and Sam Selvon

would, by this definition, be excluded, as they migrated to the UK when they

were young adults; Phillips, who was brought to the UK as an infant, would also

be questionable. Selvon’s inclusion within this definition would be even more

For example, see Stein’s discussion of themes such as “[t]he construction of a

place to call home […] effects of migration and displacement onto subsequent

generations […] cultural difference and the notorious problem of racism” (Stein,

xii).

problematic, given his Indian heritage. Nonetheless, I include these writers in my

dissertation because their work speaks to the heterogeneity and history of black

British literature. More important for my project, their novels focus on the

experience of Afro-Caribbean people’s quest for national belonging through

homemaking.

Though other analyses of literary representations of black Britishness have

also focused on questions of national belonging, and on how that belonging is

often spatialized,

my project’s focus on homemaking and especially

homeownership as the means through which black British subjects assert national

belonging departs from these earlier formulations. By attending to literary

representations of the very desire for domestic space, I explore how the nation as

an “imagined community,” to use Benedict Anderson’s apt phrase, is effected not

simply through visual and oral communications, but through embodied

experiences. In centering lived experience and spatiality in their novels, the

authors whose works I analyze make mute bodily experience part of the discourse

of the imagined community of black Britain. Representations of the struggle to

acquire, inhabit, and arrange domestic space – that is, the historical struggle black

Britons faced for domestic space– speak to the validity of this collective

experience, while also inserting the history of that struggle into the national

imaginary of Britain as a whole.

See James Proctor’s Dwelling Places: Postwar Black British Writing, and

Modhumita Roy’s “Brutalised Lives and Brutalist Realism: Black British Urban

Fiction (1990s–2000s) for analyses of literary representations of the spatialization

of racism.

Homemaking, as I argue in this dissertation, uniquely reveals both why

subjects are motivated to be included in social structures that devalue them, and

how they are blamed for their own exclusion. Homemaking aptly illustrates how

the intersectionality

of oppression functions by marshaling racism,

heterosexism, patriarchy, and economic inequity into the service not only of

upholding exclusionary attitudes, but reproducing and naturalizing them. Because

domesticity relies on both material and affective resources, whose differential

distribution perpetuates existing hierarchies, it is at the nexus of class, race, and

gender reproduction. If, to quote Stuart Hall, “race is the modality in which class

is lived” (Hall, 394)

then domestic space is where gendered class is lived. While

any discussion of homemaking and homeownership has to be attentive to issues of

gender, as Hall’s quotation reminds us, race, class and gender are inextricably, if

differentially, imbricated. It is not an accident that the novels, and therefore my

own analysis, focuses on the interplay of these hierarchies and their ambivalent

expression in these texts. The naturalization of women’s place “in the home”

positions them as agents of homemaking who perform both affective and physical

labor to produce the house as home. Furthermore, women – and these women in

particular – are less able to access the financial resources necessary to purchase

property and become homeowners. Though the acknowledgment of the

intersection of race, class and gender in domestic space is critical, it is not

sufficient to understanding the ideological power that homemaking and

See Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity

Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.”

Hall et. al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order

homeownership hold over society in general and the characters in these novels, in

particular. As I will show, homemaking functions as a metaphor for personal

worth, and homeownership stands in for citizenship, and it is this conjunction of

self-worth and national belonging that animates the desire for privately owned

domestic space. In these novels, homemaking and homeownership are the modes

through which black British characters assert their right to belong in a nation that

both exploits them and positions them as outsiders. The racism and hostility that

black British subjects face in making home reveals the hypocrisy of Britain’s self-

image as a tolerant, liberal society that values fair play and individual merit. The

quest for, and the obstacles to, home ownership exposes the racial hierarchies

upon which the British self-conception of an inclusive nation is constructed.

Why the protagonists in these novels – Adella in Waiting in the Twilight,

or Hortense in Small Island, to take two examples – endorse the belief that

homemaking and homeownership are inherently desirable and are the route to

achieving national belonging, and whether that belief is represented as being

justified, are some of the questions I explore in the chapters that follow. The

novels explore a range of success and failure in achieving belonging through

homemaking. I define “success” as approximating the desired ideal of middleclass

homeownership emblematic of national belonging, and “failure” as efforts that

fall short of this ideal. In using these terms, I am mindful not to reinscribe the

neoliberal logic of personal success and failure that burdens individuals with the

weight of systemic social inequities that can only be addressed collectively, a

topic to which I turn in chapter 3. I do, however, argue that these narratives of

personal success and striving that flourish under contemporary neoliberalism have

their roots in earlier capitalist subject formations that fundamentally shape ideals

of Britishness and which, in their inception, cohere around the idea of owning

one’s home. My analysis explores how the specific historical legacy of British

imperialism shapes ideas of homemaking and national belonging around the

idealized figure of the middleclass, white male citizen, excluding people of color,

women, and the poor and working class.

The novels (and my analysis) track two temporalities – the time in which

their narratives are set and the time in which the novels are published. In the first

two chapters, the connections between race, homemaking, migration, and national

belonging are at the forefront of the novels I discuss. Chapter 1 discusses novels

written from the mid-1970s–mid-1980s about first generation migrants to the UK

attempting to become homeowners, and shows how the state and informal social

structures thwart these efforts and cause black subjects to face housing precarity;

the economic inequity and white nationalism of the 1970s transmutes into

Thatcherite neoconservativism in the 1980s in ways that significantly alter the

structure of British housing, deleteriously affecting black subjects in particular.

Chapter 2 looks at historical novels written in the mid-1980s and mid-2000s about

the Windrush era of migration and argues that these different contexts –

Thatcherist neoconservatism and Blair’s New Labour multiculturalism – inform

very different reimaginings of Windrush history and the possibilities of black

British national belonging. Chapter 3 discusses novels from the 2010s; neoliberal

self-making and property ownership have become the predominant concerns in

the pre-Brexit era these novels describe, though racism and xenophobia remain

only superficially submerged. As I show in chapter 3, raced, classed and gendered

structures of power persist in the contemporary moment, even as they are

subjected to rhetorical erasure under neoliberalism’s ideology of individual

entrepreneurialism and the project of radical self-making. Though some anti-racist

gains have been made, to the extent that explicitly refusing to rent to black tenants

is now illegal, these novels, as a group, do not suggest linear progress toward an

increasingly equitable society. Rather, I conclude that, read together, the arc the

novels chart suggests that race, and gender, like class, have become suppressed in

a society that values economic metrics and financial net worth above all else.

In each chapter, I pair a novel that seems cautiously optimistic about the

possibility of black British national belonging, and which presents belonging as at

least a partially successful project, with another that represents failures of

homemaking and which takes a doubtful or pessimistic view of the prospect of

national belonging. Though this initial, convenient dichotomy quickly becomes

complicated, it is nonetheless useful as an organizing principle and for

characterizing the tonal differences in the novels: what I call the optimistic novels

are funny, while the pessimistic novels are anything but. Selvon’s Moses in Moses

Ascending, for example, gains and then loses control of his building through a

series of farcical events, and in the end, emerges bitter but unscathed. By contrast,

Riley’s Adella in Waiting for the Twilight experiences the loss of her home as a

blow on par with the myriad physical injuries she suffers during a lifetime of

abuse.

A similar contrast is noticeable in comparing The Final Passage and Small

Island. The casual racism and poverty that await her in England are a rude

awakening for Levy’s Hortense in Small Island, whose ideas of professional

bourgeois propriety cannot be accommodated in the cramped lodgings she and her

husband Gilbert share. The contrast between Hortense’s shabby circumstances in

London and her priggish expectations is represented as humorous, as the novel

lampoons her middleclass pretensions while also illustrating how race and class

align differently in England than they do in Jamaica. This humor seems to be

justified by the fact that at the end of the novel she ultimately achieves her desired

domestic goals despite the structural constraints of racism, and moves on to a new

life as a married homeowner. Phillips’ Leila in The Final Passage, on the other

hand, strains to follow her mother’s dictates about how to be a respectable

married housewife, and discovers that marriage, and life in England, are

alienating rather than enriching experiences; the novel is melancholic rather than

humorous, as Leila nostalgically envisions returning to the Caribbean. There, she

imagines making a home with her affiliative kin, rather than her unreliable

husband.

In chapter three, I discuss Mr. Loverman and NW. Though both Evaristo’s

Barry and Smith’s Natalie succeed in buying property and becoming well-off

homeowners, only Evaristo presents Barry’s real estate success as one of a series

of exuberant exploits. The novel positions the aesthetic renovation of Barry’s

properties as a sign of personal empowerment and belonging through

homemaking, which in turn suggests that the political conditions for national

belonging itself have evolved. By contrast, Smith represents Natalie’s

homemaking and property ownership as attempts to assert social status that she

attributes to personal achievement, but which, as Smith shows, is more an

outcome of entrenched networks of wealth and privilege. Though Natalie adopts a

meritocratic viewpoint that attempts to deny all the ways that she has been lucky

or privileged and sees her success as the result of hard work alone, Smith’s

narrative emphasizes the inconsistencies in this outlook, both by showing how

flimsy the material basis for Natalie’s construction of self-worth is, and by

contrasting her access to property with the lack experienced by other characters in

the novel, such as Felix and Nathan.

I argue that both changes in the way that structural racism manifests in

Britain, and the novelists’ different perspectives on the possibilities for

contending with racism, are reflected in the representations of homemaking as

national belonging in these novels. Read together, as I do in this dissertation,

these novels chart how the conditions for – and barriers to – black British national

belonging, as well as the response to them, manifest differently over time. In

Selvon’s novel, written in the 1970s, racism is overt and is the main barrier to

homemaking; for Moses, homeownership is a defense against housing

discrimination. Riley’s and Phillips’ novels also illustrate how racism denies

black tenants decent lodgings, and pushing them into inhabiting the least desirable

properties. However, exclusion due to racism alone does not account for the

yearning for the particular (often conflicted) articulation of homemaking we

encounter in these novels. Patriarchal constructs of domesticity position women in

relation to the home as both its guardian and prisoner, and Riley and Phillips aptly

illustrate how social conventions that regulate the organization of domestic space

inculcate gendered hegemony by valorizing homemaking as essential to women’s

social role and worth. Levy’s novel, by contrast, in having Hortense realize her

dream of moving into her own home, seems to suggest that housing

discrimination can be overcome by persistence and adherence to conventions of

bourgeois respectability. The novel’s restorative ending – Hortense can now be

the respectable, married homeowner – belies the real obstacles countless

Caribbean migrants faced. The certainty of Hortense’s success becomes

complicated when the events of the novel are contextualized within the history of

twentieth century Britain: the racial violence that marked the UK in the 1950s–

1980s clouds the seemingly bright future of homemaking and homeownership

with which Levy concludes the novel. Though this paratextual reading

complicates Levy’s ultimately sunny narrative, the fact that she has chosen to

foreground Hortense’s success makes it all too easy to read the novel as

representing an amnesiac view of history that sequesters racism in a past era that

has since been overcome. Such a temporal view of linear progress – things are

always getting increasingly better – which Levy’s novel allows readers, obscures

the reality of persistent racism in the decades since, and into the present day.

In my last chapter, I pair Evaristo’s and Smith’s novels to illustrate how

housing racism has become covert in the neoliberal present. Rather than explicitly

blocking access to housing, whether as tenant or owner, it is now the lack of

access to capital – a product of generational racial discrimination – that assumes

the role that overt racism once played. Evaristo’s novel represents the ascendance

of the insidious ideology of neoliberalism as empowering, casting her protagonist

Barry as a winner in the real estate game. By buying property, Barry successfully

and conspicuously embodies the logic of neoliberal citizenship. Smith, on the

other hand, remains ambivalent: racism continues to impede black Britons’ access

to homes, and, by extension, to national belonging. By showing how unlikely

achieving national belonging through homeownership is, Smith reveals how the

myth of meritocracy is simply that – a myth – and that it fails to reward its

adherents. Rather, the neoliberal ideology of meritocracy blames individuals for

their failure to succeed in an unjust society, obscuring the failure of the state to

address structural issues of economic and racial inequity.

Collectively, the novels are a testament to the barriers to national

belonging that black British subjects have faced. Over time, these barriers have

shifted from overt to covert racism. Racism and rejection are now superficially

concealed behind the myth of meritocracy that locates economic inequity in

individual failures or achievements rather than in hegemonic, socially sanctioned

power structures. Despite policy change and a loosening of some barriers, race

and belonging remain intertwined, as the heterogenous perspectives in the novels

illustrate.

The successes and failures in homemaking and homeownership in these

novels reveal a related social reality: the meaning and significance of housing as

private property in a late capitalist, individualist economy. The commodification

of domestic space produces its own set of problems, and the novels illustrate an

array of attempts to manage life within the confines of private property. By

representing property ownership as a successful bid for national belonging,

authors such as Evaristo, I argue, “buy into” the pervasive ideology of self-reliant

individualism. Most strongly associated with John Locke, private property

ownership as an emblem of individualism manifests in the contemporary era in

the intensified form of neoliberal self-making

: not only is the neoliberal “subject

of value” (Skeggs, Class, Self, Culture, 6, qt. orig.) around whom contemporary

society revolves positioned as a consumer and valued according to their ability to

consume products, they are also expected to produce and market themselves as

products. In the contemporary moment, housing ownership is a sign of

consumption at high levels and additionally, the aesthetics of home décor function

to signal one’s personal brand. Material consumption, in this context, is a marker

of social worth that would once have been ascribed to class position, and is now

attributed to individual skill and will. The novels chart this transition from the

hegemony of class to the rhetoric of individualism. The novels in chapters one

and two, particularly Phillips’ and Levy’s, all foreground class and show how the

aesthetics of homemaking valorize entrenched middleclass ideals about the

organization of domestic space: privacy, moderation, conformity, hygiene,

neatness are some of the ways that middleclassness manifests spatially. By

performing middleclass domesticity (derived from white middleclass ideals),

these protagonists assert their national belonging even when the ability to own

The concept of neoliberal self-making, which I discuss in greater detail in

chapter 3, draws on the work of scholars such as Wendy Brown, David Harvey,

Beverley Skeggs, Micki McGee, and Joe McGuigan.

their own homes is uncertain. In contrast, chapter 3 shows how aspirational

aesthetics have broken free of narrowly prescribed middleclass domesticity in the

twenty-first century; personal style and evidence that one is a knowledgeable

consumer of culture have replaced tropes of staid middleclass respectability.

Consumption patterns that were formerly understood as class markers now signal

the market freedom of personal choice. The persistence of raced, gendered, and

classed inequities has been obscured by the rhetoric of empowerment, as Mr.

Loverman’s representation of home remodeling as self-expression indicates.

Evaristo’s novel best illustrates this phenomenon of empowerment through

performance, presenting Barry’s real estate development and home renovation

within the frame of neoliberal self-making. Moreover, as I show in chapter three,

the privileging of private property over both communally-held property and

public space valorizes the individual consumer over the social collective. National

belonging, in this context, becomes reduced to a thin rhetoric of individual self-

sufficiency, manifested in the ability to own property. The formerly held ideals of

social welfare and the provision of public housing as a collective good as we see

in these novels, are expunged from the national imaginary.

Migration, Blackness, and the British Imagined Community

Because my dissertation focuses on representations of homemaking as a

metaphor for black British national belonging, it is important to outline the

framework in which I am analyzing homemaking as such a practice. In Benedict

Anderson’s now famous definition, nations are “imagined communities” of

dispersed individuals, whose sense of shared belonging is achieved through what

he calls “print capitalism” or media and not through the lived experience of place-

based social ties.

While ideologies of national belonging are achieved through

print capitalism, citizenship, the official, government-sanctioned form of national

belonging is guaranteed through laws and similar instruments. In what follows, I

provide a brief overview of how discourses of black British national belonging

and unbelonging have evolved from the post-World War II period to the present

day.

In the decades between the publication of Selvon’s Moses Ascending in

1975, and Evaristo’s Mr. Loverman in 2014, political and social structures in the

UK were radically reconfigured. The postwar commitment to social goods, such

as education, healthcare, and, crucially for my argument, housing, have been

replaced by a neoliberal rejection of the welfare state in favor of widespread

privatization, a development to which I will return later in this chapter, and more

fully in chapter three. In the immediate postwar period, however, addressing the

devastation wrought by the war was the top national priority, and the British

government actively recruited colonial labor to help rebuild the nation. Though

black subjects had been present in England for several centuries,

it is the

phenomenon of postwar migration, spurred by such factors as the increased ease

of travel, prior experience of being in the UK during military service, and

See Anderson, Benedict R. O’G. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the

Origin and Spread of Nationalism.

See Gretchen Gerzina’s Black London: Life Before Emancipation, as well as

first-person accounts such as that of Olaudah Equiano and Ignatius Sancho,

among others.

employment opportunities that provides the context of my analysis. As I indicated

earlier, the arrival of around 500

Jamaicans to the UK on the SS Empire

Windrush in June 1948 became symbolic of the increased, and increasingly

visible, black British presence in England. This moment has become so iconic that

the migrants who arrived during the postwar period are known as the “Windrush

generation.” Some of the newly arrived were actively recruited to fill positions in

specific industries in the UK, such as the Barbadian government’s emigration

program that led to the migration of “nearly four thousand Barbadians […] to

work for London transport, British Railways, hotels and hospitals” (Hiro, 7, ital.

orig.).

Though the Barbadian government-sponsored scheme was unique,

thousands of other migrants were attracted by the promise of employment in the

UK, where the need for workers during the postwar reconstruction period was so

great that it had a direct causal effect on migration.

Whether colonial workers

were officially recruited by the government, or migrated of their own accord in

search of employment opportunities, approximately 272,450 West Indian

migrants arrived in the UK in the period ranging from 1953 through the first half

Though 492 has become the oft-cited, canonical tally of migrants aboard the

Windrush, as Matthew Mead notes in “Empire Windrush: the Cultural Memory of

an Imaginary Arrival,” that figure is open to dispute; Mead asserts that it is an

artifact of government surveillance that fails to account for the presence of

stowaways, women, and non-Jamaicans aboard, and suggests that the historical

record supports 532 as a more accurate figure.

Dilip Hiro, Black British, White British.

Zig Layton-Henry, The Politics of Immigration: Immigration, ‘Race’ and ‘Race

Relations in Post-War Britain, 13.

of 1962, prior to the implementation of the 1962 Commonwealth Immigration

Act.

Even before they had set foot in the UK, black British subjects were

already being framed as not belonging in the nation. As British subjects, West

Indians were of course free to travel, work, and live throughout the British

Empire.

Nonetheless, their increased presence in the UK was viewed with

trepidation both by the majority-white public and by politicians. The passengers

of the Windrush were viewed as potential threats to implicitly white England,

such that the colonial government sought to monitor and restrict black subjects’

movements and even prevent their emigration.

Though there was “no logical

ground for treating a British subject who comes of his own accord from Jamaica

to Great Britain differently from another who comes of his own account from

Scotland” (qtd. in Phillips and Phillips, 69), race was the determining factor that

drew “public attention [to] the 400 or so men who are coming from Jamaica,”

who, officials assumed, would be economically dependent on the state (ibid.).

West Indian migrants, thus, were already being framed as an economic burden on

the state, a conflation of race and class that would become a common trope of

racist and classist rhetoric in the decades to come.

Though migration from the colonies was legally permissible under the

1948 British Nationality Act, unease over race intensified in the postwar period. A

Layton-Henry, Table 1.1, 13.

The British Nationality Act (1948) stipulates that “[t]he expression ‘British

Subject’ and the expression ‘Commonwealth Citizen’ shall have the same

meaning” (qtd. in Hooper, 11, fn).

See Phillips and Phillips, Windrush: the Irresistible Rise of Multi-racial Britain,

67-70.

series of so-called race riots in the decade following the Windrush arrival

produced a climate in which black British subjects were increasingly made to feel

unwelcome and unsafe. Rather than viewing the racist structure of the state as the

cause of tension and violence, politicians and the press often positioned black

subjects as the source of the “race problem.”

This tendency to cast black

subjects as the source, rather than the victims, of violence, located violence in

some essentialized aspect of blackness itself. Casting blackness as the problem,

the nation cast itself as white and unraced; through the naturalization of racism

and the implicit centering of whiteness, white subjects worked to preserve “white

racial innocence.”

Among other things, such a view worked to insulate white

citizens from interrogating their own roles in constructing and perpetuating racist

hegemony. Viewing blackness as inherently alien to the white nation meant that

immigration became conflated with blackness in political and popular rhetoric,

such that calls for “immigration control” (Glass, 144) functioned to exclude black

subjects from national belonging, both at the metaphorical level of the national

imaginary and at the political level. The state implemented a series of increasingly

restrictive immigration acts, beginning with the Commonwealth Immigration Act

of 1962, thus putting up an obstacle to migration from the Caribbean, Africa, and

the Indian subcontinent. Though the terms of the Act do not specify racial

exclusion, they effectively curtailed migration from the “darker” former colonies,

See Ruth Glass, Newcomers: the West Indians in London (1960), published in

the US as London’s Newcomers: The West Indian Migrants (1961).

See Robin DeAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to

Talk About Racism, on white people’s denial of participation in maintaining the

racist social structures that grant them race privilege.

while leaving the white settler colonies unaffected. Through the language of

immigration policy, constructed on the basis of race, the UK government made

clear that black subjects from the former colonies were not welcome in the nation.

Rhetorics and Practices of Exclusion: Powell and Policing

Immigration policy continued to be a means of excluding black British

subjects from national belonging in the 1960s and 1970s, precisely the decades

that saw the rise of white supremacist parties such as the National Front. Most

notable among antiblack politicians of this period was Enoch Powell, whose

infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968 recast Britain’s long history of

colonial invasion and occupation, by envisioning black migrants to the UK as an

invading barbarian horde that threatened the purity, and whiteness, of English

culture.

In the now infamous speech, which was prompted by the proposed Race

Relations Act (1968) then under debate, Powell positions himself as a prophetic

national savior, taking on the thankless, unpleasant task of protecting the populace

from “future grave, but with effort now, avoidable evils” that will befall the

nation if they fail to heed his histrionic words: “As I look ahead, I am filled with

foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much

blood.’” In Powell’s speech, black British citizens are permanently cast as an

“immigrant or immigrant-descended population,” marking even native-born black

Britons as foreigners. Powell viewed the passage of the 1968 Race Relations Act

as “a one-way privilege,” such that “the immigrant and his descendent should be

www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643823/Enoch-Powells-Rivers-of-Blood-

speech.html

elevated into a privileged or special class,” while “the citizen” – implicitly a white

Englishman – “should be denied his right to discriminate in the management of

his own affairs” and be made “stranger in their own country.” In Powell’s view,

the nation was an inherently racist construct, whose purity and stability were

threatened by black foreign invaders.

Powell’s speech has had a profound and long afterlife in British culture.

Even though the 1968 bill granted black British subjects nominal legal inclusion

and protection – which Powell and his ilk feared – in actual practice, black

Britons continued to be marked as not belonging and subjected to different forms

of harassment, including police surveillance. Targets of the “sus” laws,

shorthand for “suspected person” – a preemptive form of policing that would

today be understood as racial profiling – police brutality, and civilian anti-black

violence, the lived experience of black Britons made them feel that they did not

belong in the nation.

An instance of such targeted harassment can be found in

Selvon’s Moses Ascending, in which Moses and other black men who have

attended a Black Power rally are rounded up on uncertain charges and transported

in a police van. Moses likens the experience to being in “the hold of a slave ship”

For a scholarly analysis of Powell’s legacy, see Shirin Hirsch’s In the Shadow

of Enoch Powell: Race, Locality and Resistance. Recent references to Powell in

the UK press post-Brexit have been frequent, and far too numerous to account for

fully here, appearing in such publications as The Daily Telegraph, The

Birmingham Mail, The Birmingham Post, The Observer, The London Evening

Standard, and The Independent, among others.

See Layton-Henry, ch. 6, “Law and Order and Violence,” and Sewell, Section

2, “I’m Black and I’m Proud: (1970–1980).”

See Linton Kwesi Johnson’s “Sonny’s Lettah” for a poetic rendering of the

experience of being targeted as a suspected person:

www.poetryarchive.org/poem/sonnys-lettah, accessed 10 Dec. 2019.

(Selvon, 36), a rare reference to slavery in Selvon’s novel that makes explicit the

connection between past and present forms of racist oppression. Though Moses

continues to distance himself from antiracist politics and clings (almost

comically) to the idea of being the archetypal property-owning English

gentleman, for many actual black subjects, the experience of state-sanctioned

violence was the ultimate expression of unbelonging. A fundamental sense of

“alienation at the heart of the black British experience” differentiated the

generation of black Britons born in the UK from the Windrush generation, whose

experience upon arrival from the colonies was one of shock at not being

recognized as British, and not yet shaped by violence (Sewell, 71-2).

The

formative role of anti-black violence in excluding black subjects from national

belonging was pronounced: as one interviewee in Sewell’s Keep on Moving: the

Windrush Legacy: the Black Experience in Britain from 1948 put it, “Before the

riots, I was British” (Sewell, 52). The lived experience of alienation, produced

and reinforced through the complex combination of racist policing and targeted

violence at the hands of white perpetrators, was legitimated by legislation that

effectively excluded black subjects of former colonies from entering the UK,

while allowing white subjects from the colonies and dominions to continue to

travel freely, implying that “blackness and being British were incompatible” (74).

Though national belonging was not explicitly prohibited on the basis of race, it

was effectively inhibited by immigration policy crafted to achieve this result.

See Sewell, Keep on Moving: the Windrush Legacy: the Black Experience in

Britain from 1948.

Neoconservatism and Neoliberalism: Conditional Belonging

Feeling at home in the UK continued to elude black British subjects in the

1980s, though the barriers to national belonging were now different. When

Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in 1979, the tactics of racial exclusion

from national belonging changed, but their effects remained equally devastating.

Though the Conservative party continued to endorse racist policing methods and

anti-immigration policy, they also, cynically, tried to win black constituents by

denying the existence of race and racism altogether. As Paul Gilroy notes, the

Conservative party’s 1980s campaign slogan “Labour says he’s black; Tories say

he’s British” (Gilroy, 57-9) simultaneously invites black subjects into the nation

and excludes them from it, by reinforcing the idea that “the categories black and

British [are] mutually exclusive” (57). The Conservative party thus reinscribed a

logic of white racial hegemony while denying the existence of racial categories as

consequential social constructs.

Celebrating Multiculturalism, Celebrating Windrush: Depoliticizing Race?

Tony Blair’s election in 1997 (which followed Margaret Thatcher and her

conservative successor, John Major), heralded an era of New Labour

multiculturalism, but in actual practice saw the continuation of conservative

neoliberalism by another name. The conservative insistence on assimilation was

replaced by a new sense of inclusion of diverse cultural backgrounds within the

sphere of Britishness. Britain would be “a national community with a clear sense

of collective purpose and direction and also made up of different communities

interacting with each other within a shared moral framework” (Parekh, 2000,

np).

However, official multiculturalism failed to substantively change structural

inequity, for, as Sara Ahmed (among others) has noted, it focused more on

celebrating diversity, rather than confronting the realities of difference.

Under

celebratory multiculturalism, “whiteness is reimagined as the imperative to love

difference” (Ahmed, 17, fn 4)

; people of color become instrumentalized as

occasions for the display of white moral goodness. Tolerance, the lukewarm

iteration of multiculturalism, similarly rendered people of color as those who are

tolerated, while recentering white people as those who are tolerant.

Both modes

– multicultural “celebration” and tolerance – preclude black national belonging by

reading black presence as a function of white attitudes and desires. For example,

the commemoration of Windrush Square in London’s Brixton neighborhood,

home to many migrants from the Caribbean, the installation of a Windrush

memorial plaque, and the addition of “‘Windrush Sunday’ to the national

calendar”

were all acts that purported to include the Windrush generation, and

its black British descendants in official narratives of national belonging. Despite

lip service to multiculturalism, however, black British national belonging

See Parekh, Bhikhu. “Comment & Analysis: A Britain we all belong

to.” Guardian. London, England, 11 Oct. 2000.

See Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion and Strange Encounters:

Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality.

Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion.

See Derrida’s discussion of tolerance as “putting up with their difference, while

knowing full well that it’s we who are in the right” (63), in Derrida, Jacques, and

Maurizio Ferraris. “I Have a Taste for the Secret.”

See Mead, 140, quotes and italics original.

continues to be challenged, such as occurred last year when the validity of the

passports held by members of the Windrush generation was threatened.

Though the particular obstacles to black British national belonging and

homemaking that characterized Thatcher’s neoconservative position on race no

longer obtained, New Labour’s rhetoric of superficial multiculturalism failed to

address the legacy of national unbelonging that black subjects faced. As blackness

became seen as a racial identity category, rather than a term for organizing

political action, the antiracist solidarity movements of the 1960s and 1970s

fragmented in the 1980s and 1990s.

At the same time, the superficial uptake of

diversity as an officially sanctioned social good made contending with the

persistence of racial inequity difficult. Official discourse espoused an “image of

Britain as a multicultural nation, with a pluralistic tradition of tolerance” (Hirsch,

156-7).

This national self-image – a deliberate attempt to whitewash Britain’s

history of structural racism – came at the cost of denying the very existence of

racism, such that subjects “are taught not to see race” (Hirsch 9-10). The

neoconservative denial of race under Thatcher reemerged in a new guise.

Embracing black subjects only on the condition that they make no complaint

about their marginalization, celebratory multiculturalism forestalls critique and

inhibits addressing systemic inequity. Furthermore, as I will elaborate in chapter

three, the intertwining of multiculturalism and capitalism turns culture into a

See www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/may/04/windrush-scandal-no-

passport-for-thousands-who-moved-to-britain.

See Rob Waters’ Thinking Black: Britain, 1964–1985 on political blackness in

Britain.

See Afua Hirsch, Brit(ish): On Race, Identity, and Belonging.

commodity, rather than a source of communal solidarity and basis for resisting

oppression. As journalist Afua Hirsch notes, Carnival, originally a politically-

charged assertion of the value West Indian culture in defiance of endemic racism,

has become has become a tourist attraction for “enjoy[ing] a pattie and a coconut,

without letting social injustice get in the way of having some fun” (Hirsch, 293),

accruing £93 million annually.

Under celebratory multiculturalism, culture is

commodified as an economic asset. Failure to monetize cultural or personal

assets, and thereby “make something of one’s self,” is seen as an individual

failure to succeed under neoliberalism, rather than as the continued operation of

systemic inequity, a presumption that Smith critiques in depicting Natalie’s view

that her personal success is due solely to hard work, which the reader knows to be

untrue. The continued barriers to black national belonging and homemaking

devolve onto individuals and their presumed insufficiency.

“Sorry no coloured”

: Housing Racism as Unbelonging

I have outlined, albeit briefly, the numerous ways in which Afro-

Caribbeans and others were made to feel unwelcome and unsafe in Britain. One

area in which they experienced racism and rejection most directly was in looking

for housing. In many ways, the housing experiences of black British residents

most clearly reveal the nation’s structural racism: spatial exclusion maps onto

social exclusion. One of the profound changes in housing, especially for black

See Ferdinand, and Williams, “The Making of the London Notting Hill

Carnival Festivalscape: Politics and Power and the Notting Hill Carnival.”

See Glass, 59.

British citizens, was the ideological and political shift from support for the

welfare state, in which housing was a fundamental right, to the contemporary

neoliberal era, in which public housing has been curtailed in favor of the private

real estate market. In the post-WWII era, Aneurin Bevan, the first housing

minister, explicitly advocated for social housing as a means of dissolving class

inequity, in keeping with the aim of his colleague Sir William Beveridge, of

“us[ing] the organised power of the community to increase the rights of

individuals” (qtd. in Bauman, 48).

However, Bevan’s concept of housing as a

foundational right immediately began to be eroded by his successor, Harold

Macmillan, who saw public housing as a temporary stopping point on the road to

ownership.

In fact it was Macmillan’s, and not Bevan’s more egalitarian view,

that would prove triumphant. Even as the government expanded social housing in

the 1960s and 1970s, the purpose of this project seemed to be one of social

containment and conflict management, rather than a commitment to a

fundamental right and to the liberation of citizens from the oppression of class

inequity. Urban renewal projects of the 1960s and 1970s focused on “slum

clearance,” demolishing older housing stock through eminent domain, often at a

financial loss to owners, a phenomenon that Riley deftly captures in Waiting in

the Twilight when Adella loses her house to the city and must become a council

tenant. Rather than increase citizens’ rights, public housing development enriched

See Bauman, Work, Consumerism and the New Poor.

See Hanley, Estates: An Intimate History, ch. 2, “The End of the Slums: the

Rise of the Council Estates.”

contractors at the expense of tenants, foreshadowing the public-private

partnerships that would flourish in the neoliberal 1980s and 1990s.

By the time Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in 1979, public

housing was becoming something disreputable from which one wanted to escape:

the shoddily built public housing of the 1960s and 1970s that warehoused the

poor deteriorated rapidly and was, in some infamous instances, fatally poorly

constructed.

Thatcher’s passage of the Housing Act of 1980 definitively turned

not only public sentiment, but also government policy, against public housing.

Colloquially known as “Right to Buy” (RTB), the act allowed council tenants to

purchase their houses at a reduced market price. This move greatly increased the

proportion of homeowners versus council tenants, effectively making public

housing residence a mark of social exclusion.

Indeed, so successful was the

Thatcherite push toward homeownership that by 1991, the percentage of

homeowners had risen to 66%, an astonishing figure, given that in 1945, “only a

quarter of households were owner-occupiers” (Karn and Phillips, 132)

. RTB

achieved the ideological aim of its architects: to deprivilege public housing and

valorize private property ownership. Because only the better off tenants were able

See Hanley, 93.

See Hanley, ch. 3, “Slums in the Sky: the Fall of the Council Estate,” in which

she discusses the infamous Ronan Point disaster, when a public housing tower

collapsed due to faulty construction, killing four people.

See Malpass, Housing and the Welfare State: the Development of Housing

Policy in Britain, ch. 9, “Social Change, Exclusion and Housing” on how

spatiality produces social exclusion.

See Karn, Valerie, and Deborah Phillips, “Race and Ethnicity in Housing: a

Diversity of Experience.”

to buy their houses,

RTB increased inequality by “rewarding the people who are

generally better off in the first place” (Malpass, 158), further disenfranchising

those unable to buy their homes.

Far from being the social good that the original

architects of the welfare state had envisioned, public housing tenure began to be

described as “residualization” (Malpass, 111), a term which starkly figures public

housing tenants as the waste of the system. Housing now became not only a

privilege, but a sign of one’s fitness as a citizen.

This, in very abbreviated form, is the context in which the desire for home

ownership in the novels I analyze ought to be understood. In each phase of British

housing over the last century, black residents have largely been relegated to the

worst domestic spaces available. During the Windrush era, they faced outright

discrimination from landlords who openly refused to rent to black tenants.

Advertisements explicitly denying accommodations to black tenants were not

only common, they were legal.

One in eight advertisements placed in the

Kensington Post from November 1958 to Janurary 1959 explicitly stated that

“coloured” tenants were unwelcome; the following year, the proportion of

antiblack notices had risen to 1 in 6.

These figures merely represent the extent of

explicit antiblack racism in the text of ads. As Glass, who conducted the study

pointed out, the “published restrictions are only a small fraction of all those which

the migrants meet when they look for lodgings” (60). In Phillips’ The Final

See Meek, “Where Shall We Live?” on how RTB increased socioeconomic

inequality and demonized those who continued to love in council estates.

See Malpass, Housing and the Welfare State: the Development of Housing

Policy in Britain.

See Glass, Newcomers: the West Indians in London (1960).

See Glass, (58-60).

Passage, we see Leila, experiencing the phenomenon of the closed door when she

and her husband Michael look for housing in England: signs proclaiming “‘No

vacancies for coloureds’ ‘No blacks’” (Phillips, 156) shut her out from acceptable

dwellings. In other cases, racism is disavowed while it is being practiced. Often,

prejudice is transferred to putative other tenants, presumably white, who would

object to the presence of black residents. Indeed, the landlady who refuses to rent

to Leila and Michael claims, “‘I can’t make any decision till I’ve talked with my

husband […] It was the future that we were thinking of […] we just can’t help

you at this particular moment’” (156). Adella experiences a similar disavowal of

racism when she looks for houses to buy: disgusted by the dilapidated structures

she is shown and wishing to view some houses in a well-kept neighborhood, she

is told by the real estate agent that he is “afraid some people are funny about just

who they sell their houses to” (Riley, 16).

In a rather ironic twist, Selvon’s Moses, who has been denied residence on

the basis of race, is eager to be on the other side of that door as a landlord, and

gleefully imagines having the opportunity to be the one to slam the door in a

prospective tenant’s face. Throughout the novel, Moses is obsessed with

performing the role of the ideal upper-to-middleclass English (“white”) subject,

and ostentatiously flaunts his knowledge of cultural signifiers that attest to his

erudition and social capital. Property ownership is a crucial component of

performing this role. Though Moses cannot become white himself, he can

maintain racial boundaries and behave the way that white people do to people of

color: namely, by excluding them. For Moses, becoming a racial gatekeeper is

essential to accruing the social power he seeks. Selvon’s novel thus illustrates

how the informal actions of landlords, in maintaining white hegemony by

enforcing racial and spatial boundaries, contributed to the project of keeping

Britain white, and of forcing black residents into substandard accommodations.

Under these conditions of overt prejudice and exclusion, it is not hard to see why

housing, especially the desire for ownership, would emerge as a salient issue in

black British novels.

Housing conditions for black residents in the UK over time have

continued to position them as not belonging, as reflected in the shifts of types of

tenure that they occupy. In the mid-20th c., when the Windrush generation was

arriving to the UK, black Britons facing a racist housing market with no legal

protections against landlords were forced to purchase dilapidated, pre-WWI

terraced housing. They resorted to pooling their money in informal “pardner”

communal savings schemes when banks refused to grant them mortgages. Riley’s

Adella must resort to just such a scheme when she cannot secure a formal loan.

Black residents also had difficulty securing then-desirable public housing,

because priority of accommodation was based on length of residence in a

neighborhood. Writing in 1965, Hooper notes that “council housing today still

goes to people who have had longest residence in a particular area” (Hooper, 51),

and Layton-Henry concurs that “[a]ccess to council housing was initially difficult

because of rules of residence and the points system which favored local families

See Hiro, 25.

in need” (Layton-Henry, 37). Black residents were thus largely excluded by

default from both the private and public rental sector.

The first attempt to address racism in the UK, the 1965 Race Relations

Act, did not extend to housing or employment, as these were perceived as being

“private” rather than “public” domains, and therefore not subject to government

oversight.

The sanctity of privacy, and particularly private property, was viewed

as more important than addressing the negative effects of structural racism on

people of color, making clear that the middleclass, white property owner is the

subject of value in Britain. Though the Race Relations Act of 1968 intervened in

this privileging of private property by barring racial discrimination in housing, the

act was more a rhetorical gesture than an actual change in conditions, since it was

not comprehensively enforced.

When the government began “slum clearance” in the mid-1960s, seizing

older housing stock and demolishing it in order to build public housing, a

significant proportion of such properties were ones occupied by poor and black

residents, who were not adequately compensated for their property loss, though

they were granted public housing accommodation.

Describing a change in black

British housing tenure from the 1960s to the 1990s, Valerie Karn and Deborah

Phillips observe that “‘black’ groups […] are now well represented in public

housing […] a sector in which they were once acutely disadvantaged by formal

See Layton-Henry, ch. 3.

Ibid.

See Karn and Phillips, “Ch. 8: Race and Ethnicity in Housing: a Diversity of

Experience,” in Race Relations in Britain: A Developing Agenda, Blackstone,

Parekh, and Sanders, eds., 135.

and informal rules and by direct discrimination” (Karn and Phillips, 128). This

seeming improvement, in terms of reduction of direct discrimination in access to

public housing, in fact reveals the relative deprivation of black residents as a

group, given that one of the major shifts in housing in Britain from the 1960s to

the 1990s is “the transformation of council housing from an expanding rental

tenure for the more privileged ‘working class’ into a declining ‘welfare tenure.’”

(131, qts. orig.). The tenants requiring the social “ambulance service” of public

housing – prior to the passage of Right to Buy – were enumerated by one public

official as follows: “the poor, the homeless, one-parent families, battered wives,

and blacks” (qtd. in Malpass, 111). Blackness has figured for some time, and

quite explicitly, as one of a series of social deficits, grouped with economic

failures and failures to reproduce normative family structure. In relation to

housing, blackness is positioned as fundamentally socially excluded from ideas of

national belonging that are premised on an ideal socially “healthy” subject

(implicitly white, male, middleclass; probably a married property owner), who

would not need the social services “ambulance.”

As Karn and Phillips put it,

“One feels that it is not coincidental that improved access for ethnic minorities to

social rented housing has come at a time when the sector has lost status and

desirability, becoming a ‘residual sector’ for ‘residual groups’” (Karn and

Phillips, 138). Post-RTB, social housing is widely understood as a mark of

exclusion, rather than as the right Bevan wished it to be. In Smith’s NW, Natalie

observes that the price of the upper middle class house on the park she and her

See Malpass, ch. 9, “Social Change, Exclusion and Housing.”

husband buy is paid not for the edifice itself, but for “the distance the house put

between you and Caldwell,” the housing estate where she grew up (Smith, 300).

Paradoxically, ownership of private property, rather than social housing tenure, is

the path to national belonging. Rather than “feel[ing] a welcome” (Phillips, 115),

black residents are excluded from the nation as home, and their overrepresentation

in social housing marks that exclusion.

Being “At Home” in the Nation: Domestic Space and Embodied Belonging

In attending to the way that British housing policy conceives of an ideal

citizen and marginalizes those “others” who fail to fulfill its implicit

requirements, my reading of the historical record is informed by Sara Ahmed’s

theorization of belonging and not belonging as inherently embodied and affective.

Ahmed’s use of the phrase “the body-at-home” (53) to describe who is allowed to

belong versus who is made to feel unwelcome reflects the colloquial usage of the

metaphor of home for nation.

As Ahmed argues, the idea of being “at home”

connotes comfort, ease, the total relaxation and lack of defenses of one who can

simply be themselves: being at home is the ultimate belonging. However, others

feel the discomfort of not being at home, such as people of color, women, queer,

and differently abled people in contemporary mainstream Western society. Being

at home is thus a sign of social hegemony, as society is organized around the

provision of continued comforts for those who are at home in the nation. Ahmed’s

analysis of home as a form of tyranny over those it excludes provides a necessary

See Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality.

corrective to the pathologization of “residual” citizens outlined in British housing

policy, diagnosing the true location of illness in the reproduction of social

hierarchies.

Like national belonging, “home” functions on both the affective and

pragmatic registers. Speaking to this relationship between the real and the ideal of

spatiality, Stanka Radović describes “the house as a literary site of convergence of

material facts and metaphorical revisions of spatial practice” (Radović, 3) and “a

metaphor whose imaginary potential continually challenges its material

limitations” (1).

I use Radović’s helpful framework in exploring how the

metaphorical and material conditions for national belonging inform and

complicate one another. As my readings of the novels will show, characters’

desire to practice homemaking and attain homeownership, and the obstacles they

face in realizing these goals, reveals the disjunction between the affective pull of

the idea of home and what they can effect within the confines of their own houses.

“Home is where you feel a welcome” (Phillips, 115), the quote from Caryl

Phillips’ The Final Passage with which I begin this dissertation, speaks succinctly

to the desire for home as a place of ultimate belonging. This desire contains

nostalgia for childhood or maternal care and affection, as Marjorie Garber notes

in her work on the house as a locus of desire.

In her chapter “The House as

Mother,” Garber enumerates the characteristics that the concepts of “mother” and

“home” are presumed to share: as ideals, they are sites of love, shelter, security,

See Radović, Locating the Destitute: Space and Identity in Caribbean Fiction.

See Garber, Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses, ch. 2, “The House as

Mother.”

comfort and total acceptance, even if the reality of their various iterations falls

short of these ideals. Garber draws a parallel between dichotomies of woman and

mother, house and home, noting that “[i]n each of these pairings the first term is

physical and material, the second relational and affective, suffused with emotion

[…] – imagined away from the mere physicality of body and space” (Garber, 49).

The ideological association between home and mothering is paired with, and

contrasted with, the pragmatic assignment of domestic labor to the realm of

“women’s work,” a development Garber reads as the product of industrialization

and the Victorian “cult of motherhood” in the nineteenth century (52, qts. orig.).

As middleclass women’s productive (that is, income-generating) labor in the

home became less and less an integral part of the household economy, the

idealization of women as mothers, and moral leaders, increased as a way of

imbuing the role of mother with symbolic status, while restricting women to the

domestic sphere.

Domestic space has long been a technology for the reproduction of gender

hegemony under patriarchy, as architectural theorist Mark Wigley observes,

noting that “The house is literally understood as a mechanism for the

domestication of […] women” (Wigley, 332).

The material edifice becomes

conflated with women’s bodies and a symbol for their moral worth: “The virtuous

woman becomes woman-plus-house or, rather, woman-as-housed, such that her

virtue cannot be separated from the physical space” (337). While the housewife

mentioned in the early modern texts that Wigley analyzes is one who keeps the

See Wigley, “Untitled: the Housing of Gender.”

household economy in place while staying in her place, the industrial-era

housewife and ideal mother that Garber describes is no longer a producer, but a

consumer whose position as moral arbiter makes her purchasing power a sign of

moral choice: “Economic concerns were displaced onto spiritual ones. Instead of

‘value,’ one could think about ‘values’” (Garber, 52). The implicitly middleclass

position of the ideal mother making the ideal home is evident in homemaking

manuals, written in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century that Garber

analyzes, and which, I would add, persists in the present day, disseminated in

publications such as Martha Stewart’s aspirational homemaking magazine Living,

among others. The valorization of the middleclass mother underwrites the

idealization of home in ways that marginalize and moralize against those unable

to perform motherhood or homemaking according to these prescribed cultural

scripts. Homemaking thus combines the ideal and the pragmatic, fusing

aspirations for belonging with gendered labor in ways that conflate the affective

and physical work that women perform, while also evaluating their performance

against a naturalized ideal of endless material and emotional provision.

The Novels

As I have mentioned, in this dissertation, I argue that representations of

homemaking function as metaphors for black British national belonging in the six

novels I discuss. In chapter one, I discuss Joan Riley’s Waiting in the Twilight

(1987) and Sam Selvon’s Moses Ascending (1975). Riley’s Waiting in the

Twilight provides a bleak portrait of utter abjection in its depiction of Adella, a

black woman who migrates to the UK from Jamaica in pursuit of a never to be

fulfilled ideal of home. After experiencing sexual predation and subsequent

housing instability, Adella attempts to free herself from male exploitation by

purchasing her own house. This dream of financial and personal freedom,

however, is thwarted when the municipal government seizes her house by eminent

domain in order to build council housing, which Adella later occupies bitterly.

Though in some ways the council flat is an improvement over the dilapidated

structure Adella previously owned, the loss of ownership after the five years of

hard work needed to buy the house is something from which she never recovers.

Adella dies at the end of the novel, dreaming of being back home in Jamaica,

surrounded by the women she admired (despite the fact that they failed to protect

her from molestation as a child), and of being reunited with her husband, Stanton

(even though he was unfaithful, unsupportive, and brutally beat her). In Adella’s

memory, these iterations of patriarchal domination become experiences of

belonging. Riley’s portrait of Adella’s obsession with “respectability” –

adherence to gender roles prescribed by patriarchy – perfectly illustrates Lauren

Berlant’s formulation of “cruel optimism” as a mode for describing “when

something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (Berlant, 1).

Sam Selvon’s Moses Ascending dispenses with domesticity, and focuses

on property ownership – or at least management – as a means of exercising

power, a mark of status, and a sign of citizenship. Moses takes over the lease of

dilapidated house, fully knowing that it is slated for demolition, unlike Adella, to

See Berlant, Cruel Optimism.

whom that news comes as an unpleasant shock. Also unlike Adella, Moses is not

motivated primarily by material needs – for Adella, the desire to escape male

sexual exploitation and the need to house and support her children – but by the

desire to be a landlord and exercise the power over others that that social role

makes possible. Imagining himself as a landlord, Moses repeats the racist and

classist acts of discrimination that he himself has experienced, but this time, he is

on the other side of the door, with the power to slam it in the face of anyone he

chooses. The fact that Moses equates being a landlord with being racist illustrates

how being in a position to control access to housing is one of the ways that

national belonging is constructed. However, in Selvon’s satirical novel, the reality

of being a landlord differs from Moses’ imagination. His house ends up being

occupied by tenants from across the former British Empire, rather than being

peopled by “genuine English stock” (Selvon, 32) and becomes the headquarters

for Black Power activists, despite Moses’ dislike of such political affiliation.

Moses’ attempts to make his home his own private “castle” (11, 40) befitting his

image of the English veneration for private property, fail time and again, and the

novel ends with Moses losing control of the house and being relegated back to the

basement where he began. Xenophobic policy and individualistic attitudes to

private property, Selvon’s text illustrates, are characteristic of an entrenched

conception of racist white English national belonging, but they can be challenged

by more comprehensive formations of British national belonging that take in the

breadth of its former empire.

Chapter two discusses two historical novels that depict the Windrush era

of migration: Caryl Phillips The Final Passage (1985) and Andrea Levy’s Small

Island (2004). The Final Passage, set in 1958, illustrates the failure to find

national belonging through homemaking, reveals how gendered domesticity under

patriarchy produces exploitation, and critiques the desirability of migrating to the

metropole rather than remaining in the colonies. Though Leila’s mother attempts

to protect her daughter from the sexual exploitation she herself experienced as a

child when she regulates Leila’s movements and instills in her ideas about

respectability similar to those Adella holds, marriage and homemaking ultimately

prove to be modes of exploitation. Phillips ends the novel with Leila envisioning a

return to her home in the Caribbean, living near her friend Millie, the latter a

staunch defender of the joys of her “home” – her native island, rather than an

individual domicile, as expressed in the epigraph for this introduction.

Homeownership, British national belonging, and familial roles prescribed by

patriarchy are shown to be unable to produce true belonging, which is to be found

in affiliative kinship and flexible tenure of domestic space.

Set a decade earlier in 1948, Andrea Levy’s Small Island, by contrast,

presents middleclass homeownership and marriage as possible, and potential

sources of national belonging, though it also reveals the raced and classed

inequities underlying access to marriage, middleclassness, and the

homeownership that they underwrite. Levy’s protagonist, Hortense, is raised in

the middleclass home of her cousin, rather than with her immediate relatives, on

account of her light skin, circumstances which enable her to attend teacher

training college and put her in the position of meeting her future husband, Gilbert.

Unlike Leila, Hortense does not believe in an expansive affiliative kinship; for

her, marriage is the ticket to life in an ideal middleclass English home. Her

marriage is a business proposition conducted on the condition that Gilbert marry

her and provide a home for her in England; in exchange, she will pay for their

passage. Though Levy illustrates how Hortense’s dismay at the lodging-house

room she and Gilbert initially live in, and her experience of racism in England

puncture her lofty dreams of homeownership, by the novel’s end, Hortense and

Gilbert are moving into a house they have purchased. Homeownership as a route

to national belonging seems to be a success, and Hortense, unlike Leila, does not

once look back on the life she has left. Levy’s text gives the impression that,

having achieved the class signifiers that she sought, everything will turn out

happily ever after for Hortense. Only an informed reader, bringing knowledge of

the subsequent racist violence of the 1960s–1980s to bear on the novel, would see

its resolution as conditional.

Chapter three moves into the twenty-first century, and focuses most

explicitly on property ownership as national belonging. Bernardine Evaristo’s Mr.

Loverman represents homeownership as a means of cultivating national belonging

as an unqualified success in the twenty-first century. Barry, an aging Antiguan

immigrant who has built up a property empire, has also been hiding his decades-

long relationship with his male partner, Morris, from his wife and family. The

novel represents Barry’s accidental coming out as a sign of contemporary social

and political liberation, in contrast to the bad old days of the past, when violent

racist and homophobic violent attacks were more frequent. But the narrative of

personal growth as a metaphor for political change that structures the novel fails

to take into account the ways that Barry’s wealth underwrites his newfound

freedom, and how the commodification of property drives intensifying economic

inequity. In Evaristo’s novel, aesthetic choices index political stances, according

to which redecorating is cast as a sign of personal liberation. Throughout the

novel, individual, personal choices are proffered as both signs and roadmaps to

freedom, while also being presented as unhampered by systemic structures. The

persistence of economic inequity, even if some black and/or gay people are in

positions of financial privilege does not mean that social equity has been

achieved. However, Evaristo’s sunny novel avoids addressing these questions,

leaving her happy couple riding off into the English countryside they have

heretofore not explored. It is economic privilege, rather than the end of racism or

homophobia, that allows Barry and Morris to enjoy national belonging.

Smith’s NW takes a much more melancholic view of property ownership

as means of achieving national belonging. Though her protagonist, Natalie,

succeeds in university, which leads to a lucrative career and marriage to a wealthy

man – developments that enable her to buy a desirable upper middle class house –

the house never becomes more than symbol of her success. Rather than depicting

it as the source of any kind of belonging, Smith represents the house as a hollow

signifier, reducible to its material components. Alienation, rather than belonging,

characterizes Smith’s depiction of the way that her characters are shaped by their

access to domestic space and the good life – or its absence – it signifies. Unlike

Evaristo, Smith shows how material privation affects other characters, such as

Felix and Nathan, who are unable to access the kind of privilege that Natalie has.

As much as the lack of affective belonging constitutes a condition of alienation

for Natalie, those without access to financial resources can only yearn for the

things that they assume will grant them the feeling of belonging that she has since

found out they cannot provide.

Inhabiting the Body as Owning Home: Gendered Embodiment and Home

Ownership in Joan Riley’s Waiting in the Twilight and Samuel Selvon’s

Moses Ascending

In this chapter, I read Joan Riley’s Waiting in the Twilight (1987) and Sam

Selvon’s Moses Ascending (1975) and argue that the novels’ gendered

representations of their characters’ relation to space accounts for their

dramatically different narratives, despite their superficially similar subject matter.

Even though Riley’s Adella and Selvon’s Moses are both Caribbean migrants

living in London who buy property, and ultimately lose ownership of it, the

trajectories these respective protagonists take, and the formal choices the authors

make, differ greatly, due largely to the ways that domestic space is strongly

gendered. Women’s relation to space is represented through embodiment,

whereas men’s is represented as motion and agency. For Riley’s Adella, the loss

of her home is a blow to her sense of self, psychologically and emotionally, and

that loss is depicted as intimately related to her physical body. For Selvon’s

Moses, the loss of ownership impacts his sense of social status as a landlord, but

does not affect him at the level of the physical body. This difference in the stakes

of inhabiting and owning home – attempting to gain control of one’s own body,

versus attempting to gain social status – informs the very different formal choices

Riley and Selvon make: where Riley’s realist

narrative stutters forward and back

in time as remembrances of misery accrete, Selvon’s satirical novel skips along

Riley herself objects to the term realist applied to her work, as she claims not to

work within an established literary genre; she views her work as “writing reality,”

a position she expresses in her essay of the same name, and in her interview with

Donna Perry.

lightly, even through such serious matters as encounters with the law and loss of

property ownership. Selvon’s satire, I argue, is possible because his representation

of Moses does not depend on the material and metaphorical connection between

house and body; for Moses, the house is a space in which he can find the privacy

to write, and bodies are things that women have, and that he seeks to enjoy. By

contrast, Riley’s Adella is burdened by having and housing a body, and her

relations to domestic space are mediated by the legacy of imperial – and

patriarchal – oppression, in the form of exile, exploitation, and isolation.

The Body “At-Home”: National Belonging and the Reproduction of Race and

Gender in Domestic Space

When the so-called Windrush generation arrived from the Caribbean to the

post-WWII UK, they met an often-hostile white society and a neglectful

government complicit in maintaining racist social conventions and sometimes

actively implementing racist policies.

One area in which state and social racism

manifested itself strongly was in the domain of housing. As I discussed in my

introduction, landlords were free to refuse black tenants housing, and when they

did offer rental accommodations, it was in the most rundown areas, and the rates

were exorbitant. Until the Race Relations Act of 1968, there were no provisions

covering housing discrimination, and landlords could not only refuse to let to

black tenants, but also openly advertise with phrases such as “No Blacks” on their

See Chambers, Glass, Hiro, Hooper, Karn and Phillips, Layton-Henry, and

Proctor for accounts of housing racism.

listings.

Even after the passage of the act, which was largely rhetorical and did

not include provisions for enforcement, more subtle forms of racism, such as

claiming that the apartment had already been lent when black apartment-seekers

appeared, persisted.

One way to ameliorate this seemingly hopeless situation was for black

Britons to buy their own property. Property ownership had multiple benefits:

accessing housing they might otherwise be denied; avoiding predatory landlords;

generating rental income. But home ownership also functions affectively: thinking

of the house as home writes emotion onto the physical structure, and

commonplace expressions such as “Make yourself at home” reinforce and rely

upon this reference to inhabiting the home as a metaphor for comfort. Investing in

the home as the site of comfort and belonging, however, also casts it as the

potential source of discomfort and unbelonging, if it fails to provide the belonging

its inhabitants seek. Separating the home from the outside world divides private

from public life, belonging from unbelonging, but if one is unable to feel ‘at

home’ at home, an internal division erupts within the supposedly homogenous

sphere of the home itself. In articulating her theory of the way that “sticky”

emotions and embodiment function as mutually-constitutive modes of shaping

selves, cultural theorist Sara Ahmed defines the experience of comfort as being

“so at ease with one’s environment that it is hard to distinguish where one’s body

ends and the world begins” (Ahmed, 11, 148).

For some subjects, who accord

See Layton-Henry for discussion of the 1968 Race Relations Act, and Glass for

an account of investigations into covert and overt racism in the housing market.

Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion.

with raced, classed and gendered ideals, being ‘at home’ in private domestic

spaces and in public is comfortable. But for others, the experience of comfort

within or outside the home is elusive, as these spaces contain and allow the

circulation of the sticky reminders of difference that work against ease of

belonging. Black bodies, female bodies, queer bodies, disabled bodies, poor

bodies, old bodies are only some of the bodies that feel the stickiness of

difference attached to them as they inhabit social space.

The connection between home and embodiment operates on the level of

social reproduction as well, as the domestic space of the house itself has long

been gendered, and been a mechanism for reproducing gender. As Mark Wigley

argues, foundational architectural theorists have long naturalized the gendering of

space by representing the house as codifying preexisiting customs rather than

producing them, to the extent that “The house is literally understood as a

mechanism for the domestication of […] women” (332).

By starting from the

assumption that it is “natural” to build a house in which women inhabit separate

quarters, which are kept far from access to the outside world, women’s mobility is

restricted, with the result that “The physical house is the possibility of the

patriarchal order that appears to be applied to it” (336). Wigley inverts this

presumption of cause and effect in his analysis, arguing instead that the

One of Ahmed’s important interventions is to insist upon discomfort and to go

towards it rather than away from it; instead of working to ameliorate discomfort

for those who experience it, she implies that the purview of discomfort should be

extended so that all subjects feel the dis-ease surrounding them, and that they

interrogate this dis-ease as the necessary first step to learning how to dwell amidst

difference without reducing it to homogenous consensus, antagonism, or co-

option into the consumable diversity of multiculturalism.

See Wigley, “Untitled: the Housing of Gender.”

patriarchal order determines the construction of the material dwelling space, and

that “Marriage is the reason for building a house” (Wigley, 336).

The

configurations of built space are predicated on the social structures that they

serve.

As the site in which hierarchical gender roles are reproduced, domestic

space is place where women become women under patriarchy. The performance

of gender within the home is reinforced by ideologies that figure the home a place

of safety, rather than control. In “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and

Politics of Rape Prevention,” Sharon Marcus argues that this naturalization of

women’s placement in domestic space additionally presumes that such spaces are

safer for women than the public spaces outside; rape is seen as an “invasion” of

“inner space” that can be prevented by keeping women indoors, at home, even

though they are more likely to be raped there than elsewhere (398-9). The logic of

rape discourse constructs women as “subjects of fear” (394) and men as “subjects

of violence” (392), gendering space and distinguishing of sites of safety (domestic

space) from those of danger (public space). This formulation positions women as

private property within the private space of the home, through the pretense of

“protecting” – literally and metaphorically, “putting a roof over” – women from

the outside world. As I will illustrate in my readings of the novels in this and

subsequent chapters, these social scripts that relegate women to domestic space –

Wigley also notes that the ideology of privacy is deeply intertwined with the

private, masculine space of the study, which enables the act of writing about

privacy and space in the first place (349); women are kept private from those

outside the family, but the head of the patriarchal household maintains his

position from the individual private space that he alone enjoys.

and fault them if they venture outside it – spill over into conflations of women’s

bodies with the domestic space that they inhabit. Though some men’s bodies are

policed and regulated in public space as well, they are not confined to, or

associated with, the private domestic space of the home. Men’s bodies are not

spatialized in the same way that women’s are, and when they are surveilled, what

is emphasized is the effect of surveillance on their mobility – and thus on

curtailing their agency as subjects. Women’s bodies, on the other hand, are

objectified and conflated with the spaces that they inhabit.

“All That Respect”: Homeownership and Moral Worth in Joan Riley’s Waiting in

the Twilight

Riley’s 1987 novel Waiting in the Twilight depicts domestic space as

strongly gendered and inherently oppressive, in ways that both intersect with

antiblack racism and cut across racial lines. Born in 1958, Riley grew up in

Jamaica and migrated to England in 1976 to attend university.

Waiting in the

Twilight was published in 1987 to a subdued critical response compared to Riley’s

first novel, The Unbelonging (1985). A tale of a young Jamaican girl sent to live

with her sexually abusive father in England, and then subjected to racism and

mistreatment in the British school and social services systems, The Unbelonging

was heralded as the first novel published by a black British woman, and was

positioned, and critiqued, by white and black readers as an emblematic

representation of black British experience within the context of a white-majority

See Dunn, Pat, et al. “Riley, Joan.”

society, to the dismay of Riley herself.

By contrast, Waiting in the Twilight has

received much less attention over the years, and is often overlooked in favor of

the sensational first novel or her later works Romance (1989) and the

controversial A Kindness to the Children (1992).

Perhaps due to the initial

characterization of her novels as “sociological text[s]” (Perry, 268) – a

categorization she resists strongly – Riley’s work, when addressed at all, has

provoked readings that treat the novels not as literature, but rather as evidence of

black British lived experience.

Waiting in the Twilight is narratively complex; Riley does not provide an

authoritative third person narrator, and largely withholds textual cues that would

allow the reader to place the events within a predefined historical era. The choice

to withhold dates and cultural signifiers that would allow the reader to orient the

plot of the novel within the framework of “History” differentiates Riley’s novel

from Andrea Levy’s historical novel Small Island, and, to a lesser degree, from

Caryl Philips’ The Final Passage, which I will discuss in my next chapter. Instead

See Marla Bishop’s interview with Riley for the first, oft-repeated instance of

this characterization, as well as Riley herself in the essay “Writing Reality in a

Hostile Environment.”

Exceptions to this are Wolfgang Riedel, Jana Gohrisch, and Christine Wick

Sizemore; Sizemore provides a particularly useful reading of Adella’s disability in

her chapter on British women facing death, and Riedel is the first critic to read

Waiting in the Twilight in the context of Thatcherism, an intervention to which

my own argument is indebted.

There are a few notable exceptions to the otherwise poor record of criticism on

Riley’s work. In addition to critics mentioned previously, David Ellis is by far the

most astute critic of Riley’s work; Heike Paul also provides a productive account

of gender oppression in Riley’s work. Pallavi Rastogi helpfully contextualizes

Riley amongst her black British literary peers, as does Chris Weedon. Carole

Boyce Davies provides an insightful theorization of black women’s subjectivity

and writing, but I must disagree with her reading of Waiting in the Twilight.

of working within the received narratives of a commonly understood, officially-

sanctioned and prescribed past, Riley represents the past narrowly and deeply,

confining herself to the limited-omniscient perspective of the memories of a

single narrator, Adella, whose lapses into memories about her past may not be

wholly reliable. The thick muffling of memory that resists a linear narrative both

reflects Adella’s perception of her own lived experience and reflects Adella’s

sense of powerlessness within the nexus of the structural forces – Empire, race,

gender, class – that constrain her choices. As my analysis of representations of

dwelling in Waiting in the Twilight will show, the dictates of the conjoined

systems of patriarchy and empire that Adella inhabits in Jamaica and in England

position her as subordinate due to her race, class, and gender locations. When we

unravel the chronological plot from the tangle of Adella’s memory, what emerges

is a series of moves from one home to the next. Adella inhabits six domestic

spaces during her life: her father’s house in Beaumont; her cousin’s house in

Kingston; the yard house in Kingston; the rented room in England; the house she

buys; the council house where she spends the remainder of her life. Her moves to

each of these domestic spaces, and the attempts at homemaking she undertakes in

each of them, are to a great degree determined by her gender, as well as strongly

influenced by race and class. Only one of these moves, into the house she buys in

England, is the result of Adella’s own desire, and even in this case, her choices

are constrained by financial limitations and endemic racism; the other moves are

forced upon her, either covertly, through societal pressure and conventions, or

overtly, through law.

Adella’s first experience of the patriarchal oppressions of domestic space

begins in her father’s house in Beaumont, and illustrates how patriarchy and class

hierarchies reinforce one another. Because much of the text depicts the hardship

and abuse to which Adella is subjected, it is easy to forget how she begins life.

Though by no means wealthy, her family is comfortable, as evinced in Adella’s

memories of her childhood home:

It was so light, so nice and cool inside. The lacy patterned brick

that enclosed the red-polished veranda was always white. Freshly

coated with lime it was bright against the lush green vegetation and

the red dirt road. Her father was well-respected in Beaumont; he

had worked hard and bought land, a lot of land. Her mother was a

fine dressmaker, and they were comfortable. People looked up to

them, asked their advice. They were the envy of the yard (20).

This memory is prompted by its stark contrast with the houses Adella will later

inhabit in England. The house’s ambience and maintenance reifies the social

standing of its inhabitants: it is a pleasant space to be in, both light yet cool, and

evidence of its upkeep is apparent. These qualities of the house’s structure

function as testaments to the character of its inhabitants, while positioning them

as possibly middleclass, and definitely not poor. Adella describes her family as

“comfortable,” using the term metaphorically, to connote a certain bourgeois

prosperity, when citing her father’s business success and status as a landowner,

and her mother’s genteel occupation as a “fine” dressmaker. In Adella’s reflection

on her family life, the explanation for the family’s ability to inhabit in this space

is summed up in a single sentence: by virtue of his “hard work,” Adella’s father is

able to buy “land, a lot of land” and thus earn the community’s respect as

someone to “look[…] up to” and “ask[…] advice.” In this micronarrative, hard

work yields material rewards and social status in a seemingly straightforward

way. By obscuring the events that led to her father’s success, Adella affirms the

belief that hard work produces success directly, and that the ownership of a house

and land both materially underwrites and metaphorically asserts the status of the

owner as a respected member of the community.

Community can be a source of exclusion as well as belonging and

approval, however. As a child Adella is sent away from her father’s house in

Beaumont to live with a cousin in Kingston in order to avoid the attentions of

Pastor Brown, whose molestation of her would otherwise have continued.

Because Pastor Brown is not only a man, but a respected figure in the community,

no one – including Adella’s family members – is willing to confront him. Rather

than chastise the pastor for his own inappropriate sexual behavior, Adella’s family

preserves its own respectability and the overarching respectability of the

community by sending Adella away to live with her cousin. Adella, as a girl, is

thus a moveable piece in the communal space of Beaumont, while the pastor is

considered a durable feature. Adella’s ability to be at home is rendered ephemeral

by the decisions and desires of men. There is no guaranteed place for her in her

father’s house, no matter how gleaming it is in her memory.

As Riley illustrates in her depiction of the way that Adella’s family

handles her molestation, patriarchy maintains itself not simply through the

oppression of men by women; crucially, women are also complicit in maintaining

gender hegemony. Under patriarchy, women’s bodies are subjected to the

sexualized regulation of space: men’s desires, however illegitimate, determine

women’s ability to be at home in their family houses and communities. Reflecting

on her childhood experience as adult, Adella holds Pastor Brown – whom she

deems a “nasty” man (33) – accountable for his actions. However, she cannot

bring herself to critique her grandmother for punishing her for the pastor’s sexual

abuse, nor can she see that the value of respect that she so venerates throughout

her life is a tool to maintain the patriarchal order. Sadly, Adella has, as a child,

already absorbed the importance of maintaining respect for men, despite the

personal cost she incurs. Adella fears telling her grandmother, Granny Dee, about

the pastor’s molestation of her, as she knows how much the old woman respects

the pastor. But Granny Dee learns the truth, and finds Adella hiding from the

pastor:

She remembered her grandmother cornering her in the outhouse

kitchen, slapping her hard across the face after the pastor finally

left. “Yu doan know to have respeck fa a servant of de Lord?” the

old woman had asked in a quiet voice, so much worse than the

shouting of her mother and her father. “Yu doan learn better

manners in this house?” (ibid).

Granny Dee seeks out Adella’s space of refuge from the pastor and punishes the

girl for not showing him the respect his position deserves. She also describes the

house as a space for the inculcation of “manners,” the set of behaviors that enable

subjects to self-discipline. Adella’s failure to be disciplined in this way implicitly

reflects badly on the house as a whole: Granny Dee’s rebuke implies that if Adella

doesn’t represent the house she grew up in properly, the household itself will be

seen as disrespectable. The patriarchal structure is one in which the behavior of

women and girls is judged, and expected to conform to the desires of men. Even

when Granny Dee later validates Adella’s experience, it is Adella, rather than the

pastor, whose behavior must change:

“A know bout Pastor Brown and a jus sorry yu neva tell me […]

Everybady in de village know de pastor have a weakness fa de

young girl dem. Not all a dem sensible like yu, but is still no

reason fa disrespeck the pastor (33-4).

Although just prior to this passage Granny Dee hugs Adella and tells her how

much she loves her, this love is preempted by the need to both discipline and

protect Adella—and to protect the pastor. Though Granny Dee presents the move

to Kingston partly as an opportunity for Adella to make use of her skills at

dressmaking, the underlying motive nonetheless remains: Adella must be

removed in order to maintain the community as it is, without challenging the

pastor’s authority. Though everybody in the village knows about the pastor’s

predilection for young girls, they all defer to him out of respect for his holy office.

Protecting young girls from the sexual advances of men is not something that

counts in the patriarchal order; instead, men’s authority is maintained, and women

like Granny Dee help maintain it, express their affection in ways that uphold,

rather than challenge, a system that deprivileges women.

Ironically, it is the choice to remove Adella from her father’s house that

leads to her being further sexually exploited and socially censured. Riley

represents the connection between “protecting” women from public space and

oppressing them in the private space of the home in her depiction of the chain of

events that begins with Adella moving to Kingston, and culminates in her having

a child out of wedlock with an already married man. Newly arrived to Kingston

and unused to the scale and diversity of city life, Adella goes to the market to buy

fish, but gets lost and is almost mugged. Luckily, passersby protect Adella from

being a victim of crime, in stark contrast to the lack of aid Adella experiences

later in life, when she is robbed in London. Communal involvement, rather than

privacy and isolation, characterizes the Jamaican way of inhabiting and regulating

public space in the novel.

However, the same community policing of space that protects Adella from

being mugged also leads her back into the patriarchal social structures that police

women’s sexuality. Miss Vida, an older woman who takes a particular interest in

Adella after the attack, invites her over for tea, promising that she will introduce

Adella to her son, Beresford. At first, Adella is glad to meet Beresford, a young

policeman. However, Beresford conceals the truth about his marriage from

Adella, and “by the time she found out it was too late, and she was already heavy

with his second child” (ibid).

In depicting Beresford’s seduction – more accurately, coercion – of Adella

into having sex with him, Riley illustrates both how Beresford mobilizes the

rhetoric of “protecting” women from the supposed dangers of public space to his

advantage, and how private space is far more often the site of sexual exploitation

and violence against women. Adella and Beresford attend a dance, and

afterwards, Beresford suggests that they go to his mother’s house, as she is away.

Adella does not want to, but he pressures her into doing so by instilling fear of

rape:

She would have much preferred to find her own way home, but he

had insisted that the night was too dark and it was far too late. On

top of that, he told her that gangs of men sometimes roamed the

streets in cars, falling on lone women or the unwary. She had heard

such tales before […] Now Beresford was talking about the same

thing, bringing back the sick fear her cousin’s words had evoked

(105).

In this scene, Riley represents the way that rape discourse is used to instill fear in

women by constructing them as vulnerable objects of sexual violence, and their

bodies as spaces to be penetrated.

By instilling this fear, women’s behavior can

be controlled through blame and shame: if women fail to heed the warning about

their own vulnerability, then it is their fault if they are raped. As Riley’s novel

illustrates in this scene, rape discourse is used to regulate women’s habitation of

space by making the street a dangerous place and the home a haven of safety, a

discourse that disavows the violence that occurs within domestic space between

known partners. Furthermore, rape discourse is used to achieve men’s control

See Marcus on how discourse about the threat of rape is used to restrict

women’s movements and confine them to the domestic space of the home, despite

the fact that this is by far the location where they suffer the most violence.

over women’s bodies. Beresford offers himself as Adella’s protector, which, she

comes to learn, means that he believes he has sexual “rights” over her body. Rape

discourse thus regulates women’s habitation of space by representing them as

vulnerable, and non-domestic space as hazardous and the domain of men.

The veneration of “respect” that drove Adella to Kingston in the first place

intersects with the spatialized discourse of fear that seeks to keep women captive.

The same logic of sexual morality enforced through fear that is mobilized to make

women dependent on men for protection is also invoked to judge women if they

get pregnant through extramarital sex, as Adella does. As a direct result of her

family’s decision to send Adella to Kingston to avoid sexual scandal, Adella

becomes the subject of sexual morality policing. Upon learning that she is

pregnant, her cousin tells her to leave the house: “A not gwine trow yu out on de

street tru yu is family. But a not gwine have yu disgracing me name by staying

here wid dat abomination” (111). While the familial relationship is enough to

keep Adella from being cast out on the street, it is not enough to allow her to

remain in the house. The purity of the domestic space, her pious cousin’s words

imply, is more important than the family relationship. When Adella claims that

her pregnancy is an accident, her cousin views it as proof of wickedness, and

vows to let “everybady fram here to Beaumont know what yu tun into” (ibid.).

Not content with ordering Adella out of the house, her cousin seeks to destroy

Adella’s sense of communal belonging by casting her as a disrespectable figure.

The social censure Adella suffers following Beresford’s sexual coercion both

results from the gendering of domestic space as a place of putative safety, and in

turn produces further restrictions on her ability to inhabit domestic space.

Adella’s sexual experiences lead to her being cast out of the domestic

space of the family, and compel her to exchange sex for housing, given the lack of

other options available. When Beresford finds out that Adella is pregnant, he

blames her, and does not offer to marry her as she had hoped. Instead, he offers to

pay for a room in a yard if she will keep silent about his culpability: “It was not as

nice as her cousin’s house. It was made of wood, one large room and a veranda

and the only furniture was a bed he told her he got cheap” (112). The fact that

Adella must rely on the castoffs of others, share a “pit toilet” and “cooking

shack,” and live in a wooden-construction room, which here signifies poverty,

emphasizes the deprivation that results from being sexual exploited. The only

upside is that Adella feels that the room “was hers and she could come and go as

she liked” (112). Adella does manage to glean some benefit out of her reduced

circumstances, in having gained the right to move freely through space, but she

does not actually have the “freedom” that Beresford ascribes to the space (113).

Instead of freedom, Adella experiences increasing isolation and

dependency. Once her pregnancy becomes visible, Adella’s dressmaking clients

no longer welcome her into their homes. Unable to provide an income for herself,

Adella must rely on Beresford for money, and Beresford demands sex in

exchange. In voicing his demands when Adella resists sexual intercourse,

Beresford reinvokes the rape discourse linking sex, space, and fear: “Yu tink is up

toun yu live now? […] Yu tink yu can jus lie by yuself dung ya? Well yu betta

learn dis fram now. If yu doan have a man fe proteck yu, yu gwine have plenty

trouble” (113). Beresford’s “protection” comes with the price of Adella’s sexual

availability to him, and carries with it the promise of her (but not his) exclusivity.

Beresford spatializes rape discourse to enforce Adella’s dependence upon him and

to coerce her into a sexual relationship with him alone. Instead of the haven the

domestic space is often represented as being, Riley represents it as a contingent

space regulated through discourses of fear and gendered imbalances of power and

domination.

Because Adella cannot marry Beresford and become a “respectable”

housewife, she seeks social acceptance by marrying Stanton. Adella and Stanton

migrate to England, where racism compounds the gender oppression that Adella

faces. Adella’s hopes of bourgeois respectability through domesticity are crushed

by formal and informal racism in post-WWII England, as I have discussed in my

introduction. It is this housing environment that Adella and Stanton find when

they arrive in England. One strategy that migrants used to address the racist

housing market was for black residents to purchase property and rent out rooms,

usually to black tenants. However, as Riley shows, black landlords were not

necessarily less predatory than white ones. Adella and Stanton find

accommodations with a Mr. Thomas, who uses his status as landlord to sexually

proposition Adella. Shrewdly, Adella is able to use the rhetoric of respectability

that has heretofore allowed her to be taken advantage of in order to deflect Mr.

Thomas’ advances by flattering him:

“Missa Thomas, yu is a well talked about man in de community, a

leada. […] Yu is a man of property,” sh had said, hiding a smile as

she saw him straighten up. “A man dat other people admire. A tink

of yu as a example, Missa Thomas. A man whose works a can live

by” (27).

Physically, he outmatches her, so Adella instead appeals to Mr. Thomas’s

“vanity,” addressing him as a leader of the community who is therefore above

wayward sexual behavior (ibid.). Significantly, Adella calls Mr. Thomas “a man

of property” in the course of enumerating his moral values and public standing.

Property ownership is thus more than the relationship between the commodity and

the purchaser of that commodity; property functions as a signifier of moral worth.

In this scene, Riley astutely represents the bourgeois belief in property ownership

as a moral guarantor, while simultaneously illustrating the falsity of that

assumption. Mr. Thomas is both a property owner and an immoral man who

chooses to use his financial and physical power to exploit women renters. Only

his desire to seem like a man of principle prevents him from taking advantage of

Adella’s dependency. It is this dependency that compels Adella to suppress her

feelings about Mr. Thomas: “If only they didn’t need the room so bad. But a place

like this, with black people owning it, was hard to find, so she had to hold her

tongue” (27). The racist housing market makes finding lodging difficult, and

Adella must weigh the importunities of gendered sexual exploitation against

structural and informal racism and her financial needs. By appealing to Mr.

Thomas’ image of himself as a principled man of property, Adella is able to

manipulate patriarchal rhetoric in order to avoid imminent sexual exploitation.

However, the underlying hegemony of patriarchy remains unchallenged.

Adella painstakingly saves her money in order to buy her own house and

achieve some spatial and financial freedom. Unfortunately, this hope is doomed,

both because Adella does not escape the structure of patriarchy that continues to

exploit her, and because the government eventually seizes her house as part of a

municipal redevelopment scheme. Riley transitions from first mentioning the loss

of the house at the end of chapter 1, to the purchase of it at the opening of chapter

two, thus foreshadowing the grief that Adella will feel and setting up her efforts to

purchase the house as a lost cause. This sense of foregone loss casts Adella’s

difficulty saving money for the house in a particularly harsh light. Adella’s

marriage to Stanton has deteriorated because she has failed to give birth to sons,

which he views as a personal failing of hers. Supporting the children by herself, it

takes her five years to save up enough money through the “partner” system of

informal pooling of resources amongst friends and acquaintances, before she goes

to look at a house to purchase. She is dismayed by what she finds:

[I]t was like any other road in that decaying part of Brixton. “Dese

places older dan Granny Dee,” she thought with distaste, bitterness

creeping into her. All those houses for sale in the papers, neat rows

of them filling page after page. How could this one cost so much?

(14).

Adella’s initial impression of the house reveals its structural flaws, as well as the

structural racism that leaves her with no other options for buying property.

Despite her dismay when confronting the state of disrepair that the house is in,

Adella is not surprised that she has been offered a decrepit property located in the

same kind of neglected neighborhood where she currently lives. Conditioned to

the racist treatment that she continually endures in England, Adella nonetheless

confronts the white estate agent about the quality and the price of the house. She

has looked at other houses for sale – “Well painted with neat gardens and pretty

gates – those were the sort of houses she had dreamt of owning, not this broken-

down, half-dead place in the middle of a rotting street” – and that some of them

are still available (16). When she inquires about viewing these houses, however,

the estate agent demurs, remarking that he is “afraid some people are funny about

just who they sell their houses to” (ibid.). Adella refuses to accept this statement

at face value, and asks the agent, “But yu wouldn’t live inna it yuself?” (ibid.).

When he lamely replies that he “just wouldn’t fit into this kind of community,”

Adella “sourly” replies, “A know what yu mean” (ibid.).

In representing Adella’s search for a house, Riley represents how racism

in the UK manifestations spatially through housing. The room that Adella and her

family occupy in Mr. Thomas’ house is inadequate, yet the only property

available for purchase is dilapidated while being exorbitantly expensive for the

condition that it is in. While black people were not officially barred from buying

property, in practice, owners were, as the agent state, “funny” about whom they

sold their houses to. This soft-structural racism was, as Riley shows, just as

suffocating as the official racism of immigration quotas was limiting. By being

excluded from the well-maintained houses in the bourgeois neighborhood in

which she would like to live, Adella and other black subjects are effectively

ghettoized, segregated into undesirable spaces and then blamed for the disrepair

of those spaces. In the eyes of racist press and politicians, the ruination of black

neighborhoods is seen as a manifestation of qualities inherent, culturally or

essentially, in the black people dwelling there, when in fact the prior disrepair of

those spaces is what, in a racist society, marks them as unfit for white inhabitants,

but acceptable for black people.

Despite the agent’s attempt to shift the

discourse into the registers of individual choice – how private individuals dispose

of their private property is presumed to be their own private business – or of

cultural preference – underlying his lame assertion that his family would not fit

into the local (black) “community” – Adella sees these feints for the racist

restrictions that they are. The exclusion of black subjects from the national

community is spatially concretized in the dis-integrated housing that they are

forced to occupy.

Dis-integration is a both a reality and a metaphor in Riley’s text, at the

social, household, and bodily level. The house is already falling apart when

Adella buys it, but the dramatic collapse of the roof seems to impel other forms of

physical and metaphorical disintegration. In quick succession, Adella has a stroke,

her marriage breaks up, she loses ownership of her house, and she loses her job.

The loss of the literal roof over her head is amplified by the subsequent crumbling

of her social and economic supports, and even her very body.

See Glass on creating a linkage between race, immigration, and housing.

shortages as a technique for white nationalist fascist groups to gain support: 177,

183-7, 191.

Riley connects the disintegration of Adella’s body, in the form of her

stroke at age thirty-four, to the disintegration of her marriage, and her house, by

showing how women are burdened with gendered familial responsibilities, while

men are served, or serviced, by women. Awakening from the stroke, Adella is

confused about her condition and inability to move, but her first thoughts are of

the children: “She had to do something, the children would be getting up, needing

attention. She couldn’t lie here doing nothing” (50), she thinks, a refrain that she

reiterates mentally as she lies unable to call for help. At the same time, Adella is

intimately aware of her tenants’ routines, hearing the familiar sounds of Mrs.

Weston cooking her husband’s breakfast, “even though she didn’t need to get up

for her factory job for another two hours” (ibid.). Riley underscores how Adella’s

stroke, brought on by being overworked in her efforts to provide for the children

without Stanton’s help, is linked to a larger pattern of gendered inequity affecting

the domestic labor performed by women for their husbands and children by

including Adella’s observation on the Westons’ morning routine in the scene

depicting the aftermath of her stroke. It is not simply Stanton’s personal failures

as a husband (though they are numerous) that have unduly burdened Adella and

led to her stroke, but the gendered roles of husband and wife. The expectation that

all women should serve their husbands and perform household labor without

remuneration has endangered Adella’s health, and it is clearly endangering sleep-

deprived Mrs. Weston’s health, as well.

See Arlie Hochschild and Anne Machung’s The Second Shift for a classic

analysis of the burden of domestic labor on women.

Riley also succinctly reminds us how class and race also affect health in

the above scene. The tenants are awakening because Mr. Weston is “on the early

shift this week” (50) driving a bus, a service job for which black workers from the

Caribbean were actively recruited in the post-WWII era. This type of job

effectively differentiates the working-class – perhaps what might be more

accurately termed the service class in the contemporary post-industrialist era –

from the professional class; like other forms of shift work, especially variable-

hours shift work as Mr. Weston appears to have, it has significant, potentially life-

shortening, negative health effects for workers.

The effects of race and class

necessarily ramify on employment, and thus on health and quality of life, for all

black, service-class workers. However, as Riley shows, the triple intersection of

race, class, and gender puts black women at a particular disadvantage because

they and they alone are responsible for the work of household upkeep and familial

service, while men are excused from performing this labor.

After Adella’s stroke, Stanton begins an affair with her cousin, Gladys,

and Gladys moves into the already cramped house. Adella eventually musters the

courage to throw her out. When Stanton asserts “I is de man in dis house an what

a sey is what happen,” Adella asserts her own authority over the house:

“Dis house is my house, Stanton,” she said quietly. “Is me save de

money and is me get loan from de bank. Yu neva waan fe know

nuting bout it and yu neva help wid it at all. So if I doan want

Gladys in here a gwine tell her fe go.”

See Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep on the negative health effects of shift

work as a sleep-pattern disruptor.

She had half-expected the blow, yet when it came, it rang in her

ears, causing her to cower in fear.

“Sey dat again?” he shouted. “Gwan insult me one more time.”

“A sorry, a neva mean fe insult yu,” she said, still shaking from the

shock of the blow, “but a not gwine let her stay ya and mash up me

family” (63).

Riley illustrates the different stakes involved for men and women in patriarchal

structures. Stanton is concerned with maintaining the pride and status he feels he

is owed as the head of the household; Adella is concerned with the prospect of

losing her life, as Stanton tries to suffocate her with a pillow and mocks her for

not even being able to die properly. For Stanton, the house is merely a symbol of

his authority as a man; for Adella, it is a material structure that must be

maintained through hard labor, and which is necessary for physically housing her

family, a responsibility that is hers alone. Though she knows the price she will

pay for confronting Stanton, her family is more important to her than the pain that

she suffers. Despite this pain, Adella continues to think that she needs a man to

maintain her respectability, and she continues to hope that Stanton will return to

her even after he and Gladys leave for America, envisioning him returning on her

deathbed at the end of the novel. For Adella, the patriarchal construction of

marriage as a guarantor of respectability is stronger even than her own experience

of abuse.

The house is both a powerful symbol of respectability for Adella, and the

material means of supporting her family, as Riley illustrates in linking Adella’s

bodily and marital disintegration to structural disintegration in her representation

of the scene in which Adella’s roof collapses. Her job cleaning offices in the City

feels like a downgrading from her previous seamstress work, but she is making

ends meet. The house is her only concern:

Only the house worried her, the way the dampness had turned to

seeping waterfalls, running in rivulets down the walls before

vanishing into fungus growths. Adella wished she could do

something about it, sensing that the house was decaying all around

her.

It was after she had been working less than three years that disaster

finally struck. Adella had woken to a loud and violent crash. Half-

asleep, her heart pounded in alarm. “De house fall dung” (95-6).

Unlike the stroke, Adella immediately knows what is happening, and begins to

calculate how it will affect her and the children. She fears that the tenants will

take legal action against her, or that they will find other accommodations, “now

that other West Indians had their own houses,” which loss of income will make

her unable to pay the mortgage (98). What prevents her from being sued for

damages is that Adella discovers the tenant of the room below the collapsed roof,

Mr. Dawson, in the midst of an affair, and her silence effectively assures his. Both

the disintegration of the house and of Adella’s body are paired with married

men’s infidelity: Adella’s stroke leads to Gladys moving in and having an affair

with Stanton, while the collapse of the roof reveals Mr. Dawson’s affair. Riley

thus links embodiment and domestic space through the common thread of

marriage that binds bodies and houses together in the marital home. In doing so,

she also articulates the instability of both bodies and houses and positions

marriage as a potentially dangerous relationship for women to inhabit. Though

Adella thinks of the house as the guarantor of her security – “At least a have de

house,” she told herself grimly. “Whatever happen a still have dis” (99) – Riley

represents this view as providing a false sense of security. By staking their

security on men and marriage, women as wives restrict themselves to forms of

belonging that will not support them.

Unfortunately, Adella’s sacrifices to acquire the house, and her desire to

gain some financial and spatial control are undermined when her house is seized

by eminent domain to make way for council housing developments. As I have

discussed in my introduction, the structure of British housing experienced

massive changes during the second half of the twentieth century, as provision of

council housing was later replaced with privatization. Adella is caught at the

midpoint of this transformation, during the height of the so-called slum clearance

and building of public housing estates during the mid-1960s to mid-1970s.

When Adella gets the letter from the council saying that they will take her house,

the shock of it causes her to be an hour late for work cleaning an office in the

City. Despite having worked there nine years and never having been late, Adella

is fired. She gets a cleaning job locally through the council but the wages are

insufficient, and she struggles to make ends meet. The financial difficulties she

faces lead her to accept money from men in exchange for sex: “She hated the men

See the documentary film Blacks Britannica for a compelling treatment of this

subject.

that used her, hated them while she needed them […] Still the money was never

enough, the bills piled up, red letters from the gas and electric people followed by

disconnection” (123). In order to keep the utilities running in her house prior to

her eviction, Adella must receive money from these men, since she cannot get a

loan at a bank. Riley represents the extortive nature of sexual encounters between

men and women as an extension of the oppressions of the state and economy in

order to de-idealize domestic space and to illustrate the ways in which it often

functions as a site of exploitation and domination. Though the state does not come

to her aid when she is faced with racism in the housing market, its impersonal

bureaucracy informs her, by mail, that the house she worked so hard to purchase,

and which she has done so much to maintain, is no longer hers. Adella finds

herself in a similar position to that which she experienced in Jamaica with

Beresford, exchanging sex in order to secure a place to live for herself and her

children.

When Adella does move into council housing, it feels like a defeat: “Now

she was back where she had started, paying rent […] She had expected so much

from the house. Now she had nothing” (125-6)— except, of course, considerable

debts that she is unable to pay.

No matter what comforts the council house

might provide – heat; a structurally sound roof – it cannot compensate,

emotionally, for the loss of her own home, a loss from which she does not

recover.

Commentator Ron Phillips in Blacks Britannica notes that black homeowners

whose houses were seized by eminent domain were often given as little as the

equivalent of two weeks’ rent in compensation, as the result of the low valuation

of the properties in question.

Riley concludes her novel in the most definitive way possible, with

Adella’s death. As she has waited in life, so Adella waits while dying, for an

ambulance to take her to the hospital after she has another stroke, and for a bed in

intensive care that she never receives, an experience that Riley represents her

reflecting on with familiarity if not acceptance: “She was used to waiting in dim

half-lights. This was just another wait” (156). For Adella, death is just something

else to wait for, an event that will befall her and that can neither be prevented nor

hurried. Like most of the events in Adella’s life, it will just happen to her whether

she wants it to or not; she is not necessarily passive so much as lacking in the

power to contend with any of the systems or their representatives – patriarchy,

employers, banks, medical institutions, city planners, racists – that exert force in

her life. Only in saving the money for her house and buying it – the one time that

her waiting amounted to something – does Adella’s waiting yield positive results,

but this gain is overturned in an instant, and the rest of her life is spent waiting for

things that never come. Lying in the hospital bed, waiting for death, Adella’s

perception of time passing is muddled and mixed with her memories of Jamaica,

and of waiting for her children and her husband, Stanton. Her children have not

spent as much time with her as she would have liked: “She could remember

waiting for them to visit and listening wordlessly to the excuses when they

phoned to say they were not coming” (158), and even as she is dying, Adella

rehearses these excuses in her mind, resenting and also absolving her children for

their neglect and the outside interests that keep them from her. Her attitude toward

Stanton is likewise ambivalent, but more dramatically so. Although she

acknowledges, on the one hand, his failures as a husband, reflecting, “Stanton let

me dung” (154, qts. orig.), she also clings to the memory of the fact that he sent

for her to come to England, and uses this as the pretext for believing that he will

come back: “He had sent for her. This was not the first time she had waited for

him. Twenty years, thirty, what did it matter how long she had to wait? Stanton

would come back and that was all that mattered” (155). Nothing that Adella waits

for, except death, finally comes to pass; she dies in the hospital bed, surrounded

by visions of the dead, and comforted by the fantasy that Stanton has come back.

Riley ends her novel with Adella’s triumphant vision of communion with the

dead, and the long-awaited granting of the respect that she has sought and been

denied in life, in order to contrast this fantasy with the emptiness of Adella life, in

which she simply waited for death while being mired in misery. For Adella, home

and belonging are nowhere on this earth, and can only be found in her

imaginations of the afterlife.

“I am the landlord”: Property Ownership as Social Mobility in Sam Selvon’s

Moses Ascending

While Sam Selvon also represents a West Indian migrant dwelling and

buying a house in London, he depicts the relationship between home and national

belonging being expressed through property ownership in a very different way

than Riley does. Selvon published his first novel, A Brighter Sun (1952) shortly

after migrating, in 1950, from Trinidad, where he had been a journalist, to

London, where he lived in a rooming house much like the one depicted in his

“London Fiction.”

Not long after that, his 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners

was published, marking a significant stylistic and thematic departure from the

earlier novel, which was set in a traditional West Indian agricultural community.

Selvon’s work can be divided into his “West Indian” and “London” fiction, the

former exhibiting a pastoral lyric realism, and the latter a farcical verve

occasionally tinged with melancholy. The Lonely Londoners represented the

migrant experience in London through the calypso-inflected

voices of multiple

memorable characters, central of whom being Moses Aloetta, who goes on to

become – in name, if not entirely possessing the same sensibility as originally

depicted in Lonely Londoners – the protagonist of Selvon’s later novels Moses

Ascending (1975) and Moses Migrating (1983). Selvon is variously considered a

West Indian and a black British writer, depending upon the context of the

categorization, and is often grouped with the postwar cohort of Caribbean

emigres, such as George Lamming, Andrew Salkey, and V.S. Naipaul who

arrived in London and began publishing works that would become the core of the

black British literary canon. Moses’ aspirations to become a writer himself in

Moses Ascending illustrate how authorship – the ability to control narratives about

the colonial experience and influence mainstream British society, while

demonstrating mastery of entrenched cultural tropes – can be understood as a

See Barratt “Selvon, Sam,” and Selvon, “Finding West Indian Identity in

London.”

See Nasta, Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain;

Forbes, “Revisiting Samuel Selvon's Trilogy of Exile: Implications For Gender

Consciousness and Gender Relations in Caribbean Culture”; Okawa, “Humour in

exile: The subversive effects of laughter in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners

and Gisèle Pineau’s L’Exil selon Julia” for discussions of Selvon’s calypso

aesthetic.

form of cultural self-determination prior to official decolonization, even as it

exposes the inequities colonial subjects endured under empire, and which black

subjects continued to experience under the endemic racism of life in the UK.

Unlike Riley’s Adella, whose story we are told through Riley’s narrative voice,

Moses explicitly takes control of his own story, even though doing so sometimes

reveals his ignorance about the very subjects he claims to understand deeply.

Moses’ bid to be an author emphasizes the constructedness of Selvon’s own

narrative, in direct contrast to Riley’s declaration that she is “representing reality”

in portraying Adella’s life story.

Unlike Riley, Selvon does not concentrate on gender relations as an

explicit theme, although much of the plot hinges on the intersections of race,

nationality, and gender. Rather than write West Indian attempts at home buying as

tragedy, as Riley does, Selvon depicts his West Indian protagonist, Moses,

buying, and eventually losing, his house, using satire, which allows him to offer a

wide-ranging critique of both anti-black and anti-immigrant racism, as well as

black power politics. Because Selvon’s critique is offered in a light-hearted,

humorous vein and delivered through the voice of Moses, a comedic figure who

takes pains to demonstrate that he is more English than the English, it entices the

reader to explore the topics of racism, migration and housing discrimination that

they might otherwise eschew if presented in the kind of heavy-going narrative

Riley employs.

Selvon’s use of satire, rather than Riley’s tragic realism is possible in part

because of the gender difference of their respective protagonists. Although Moses

does experience racial discrimination and police violence, he avoids the gendered

violence and social censure that occupies much of Riley’s text. In contrast with

Riley’s depiction of Adella as burdened by her body and the need to house it,

Selvon’s depiction of Moses as a desiring subject renders him oddly bodiless: he

wants women’s bodies, but he doesn’t really seem to have a body of his own. As a

disembodied subject, Moses’ motive in buying property is status-driven, rather

than being driven by survival or the need to avoid social censure. Furthermore,

Selvon’s representation of Moses’ dwelling practices highlights two key gendered

differences that contrast his experience of home ownership with that of Adella.

The first is that, for him as a man, the house is only a source of income, status,

and privacy, rather than also being a site of family, gendered violence, or work.

Unlike Adella, Moses is not burdened by children, a violent husband, or

household chores; instead, he receives rent, has a servant to do household work,

and spends his time at home alone, working on his memoirs. The second

difference is that Selvon emphasizes Moses’ need to belong in public, as well as

private, space, in contrast to Riley’s depiction of public space of real or rhetorical

danger. In Selvon’s novel, the house functions primarily as a metaphor for

national belonging, rather than as a site in which national belonging is negotiated

through practices of homemaking.

In contrast to Adella, who wants to own her own house as a mark of

respectability, Moses views owning his own house as a sign of status.

Where

See Carla Freeman’s discussion of Peter Wilson’s paradigm of the gendered

respectability/reputation dichotomy in Caribbean culture, in which the former

term regulates women’s behavior, while the latter evaluates men’s.

seeking respectability is motivated by the threat of sinking downward and being

cast out of one’s community, status-seeking focuses on striving upwards. For

Moses, the primary appeal in purchasing the house is that, as his friend Tolroy

puts it, “you will be a landlord and not a tenant” (2), and it is the appeal of being a

landlord that convinces Moses to buy, even though he knows that the house is

structurally unsound and scheduled for demolition by the council. Moses gleefully

reimagines his former interactions with landlords and social institutions, putting

himself in the position of being a landlord:

“Er, Mr. Moses, er, I’m sorry about this procedure, but we usually

ask if our customers know anyone who will be prepared to act as a

guarantor? Perhaps your landlord?”

“I beg your pardon, I am the landlord.”

“Oh…how silly of me…if you’ll just sign the form here, SIR…sit

down…use my chair.”

I can also be on the other side of the door when people come to

look for rooms.

“Is the landlord in?”

“I am the landlord.”

“Oh…I’m looking for a room.”

“I don’t let out to black people.”

SLAM.

I might even qualify for jury service.

I quote at length here because the facets of Moses’ vision of what being a landlord

will be like demonstrate the way that constructions of domestic space and

property ownership are inherently racist and are in service of the state authority,

and even citizenship itself. As I argue in my introduction, homeownership has

become tantamount to being a precondition for citizenship, and thus national

belonging. When Moses comments that he might even qualify to be a juror,

Selvon explicitly connects citizenship rights and to duties to property ownership:

property ownership, Moses states, might entitle him to participate in adjudicating

the law, rather than being the subject of surveillance under the “sus” laws.

Owning property, in Moses’ representation, literally puts him on the other side of

the law by rendering him fit for jury service. Though, in this instance, Moses

himself seems to be adopting a satiric tone that is self-aware of its own superficial

facetiousness – neither Moses nor the reader is positioned as believing that

property ownership is literally a requirement for jury duty – Selvon’s satire asks

us to consider the ways that social reality is not that far removed from parody.

By presenting property ownership as underwriting jury duty, Selvon

critiques the ways that official national belonging, in the form of citizenship, is

predicated on having the financial resources to become a homeowner, and

illustrates how property ownership is dependent upon multiple financial

transactions, and interactions with gatekeepers representing social institutions.

Moses’ first scenario, that of trying to secure a loan, illustrates the difficulty that

people without funds or assets have in securing them, much like the experience

See Layton-Henry, ch. 6, for a discussion of the “sus” laws.

that Adella had in unsuccessfully trying to get a loan from the bank. According to

the circular logic of financial institutions, however, already possessing assets

makes one worthy of possessing additional assets, and thus deserving of a loan.

Instead of being in the position of having to produce assurances that he is reliable,

property ownership becomes Moses’ guarantor of creditworthiness. The physical

and verbal gestures of deference that Moses receives – being offered the chair,

being called ‘sir’ – signify that he occupies a different social position now that he

is a landlord. The exaggerated displays of subservience Moses receives represent

a heightened, yet not totally inaccurate, view of the social privilege accorded to

property owners in comparison with the propertyless.

Moses further develops the sense of social power that he will enjoy as a

landlord by imagining what it is like to be “on the other side of the door.”

Significantly, Selvon depicts Moses replicating his own experiences with racist

landlords, in reverse: as he was denied apartment rentals in the past due to

landlords’ racism, now he imagines himself rejecting black renters. For Moses,

reproducing racism is thus an essential part of being a landlord. Only by

maintaining the raced configuration of domestic space can Moses truly inhabit the

role that he desires.

Upon purchasing the house, Moses further enhances his sense of status by

choosing which floor to occupy. His choice reflects a connection between the

physical structure of the house, and metaphors of space as signifiers of status:

“Having lived below the surface of the world all my life I ensconced myself in the

highest flat in the house: if it had an attic I might have gone even higher still” (3).

Moses’ association between dwelling space and status reflects common figures of

speech that read spatial placement as indicative of social position: to say that

someone has ‘come up in the world’ reflects a belief that ascendance is a positive

trait, where as the corollary of ‘gone down’ has negative connotations.

Moses

eagerly wishes to put his time in the “basement brigade” (3) behind him, and

moves into the top floor to enjoy the privileges of being a landlord. Rather than

think of the floors of the houses psycho-poetically, as Gaston Bachelard does,

in practical terms, the way Adella does in thinking about her house, Moses thinks

instead of dwelling and the organization of domestic space as manifestations of

social power. To cement this spatial distinction, Moses hires a white servant

named Bob, who lives in the basement, thus emphasizing the Moses’ own

ascendance over the white men who outrank him in other social spaces.

For

Moses, being a landlord confers mastery, visibility, and the opportunity to be on

top in a position of dominance, rather than hidden and overlooked in the basement

apartments he has previously occupied.

Though black men, in particular, are often positioned as hypervisible

and

thus the targets of police surveillance, the right to be visible, rather than concealed

See Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, for a discussion of the

metaphorical meanings of movement within space, such as indicated by the

prepositions “up” and “down.”

See Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space for a reading of space as metaphor for

psychology in Western bourgeois houses.

In the section on Moses’ training of Bob, Selvon satirizes Robinson Crusoe,

inverting the paradigm of white colonizers ‘civilizing’ people of color by

depicting Moses teaching his “man Friday […] the ways of the Black man” (4-5).

See Reddy, “Invisibility/Hypervisibility: The Paradox of Normative Whiteness”

for a discussion of how racial and sexual minorities are both overlooked and

surveilled by the white heterosexual majority.

“below the surface of the world” (3), as Moses puts it, is part of the project of

national belonging. Unlike Riley, who illustrates how the gendering of domestic

space render public space a site of danger for women, Selvon reveals the

racialized employment practices underlying the production and maintenance of

public space in Moses’ paean to black British workers. Inverting norms of white

spatial privilege and black exclusion from space, Moses reveals the raced

invisible labor that makes the city run.

After assigning Bob tasks and settling

down to write his memoirs in a leisurely fashion instead of rushing off to work,

Moses begins “taking an objective view of this whole business of employment”:

The alarms of all the black people in Brit’n are timed to ring before

the rest of the population. It is their destiny to be up and about at

the crack o’dawn […] He does not know how privileged he is to be

in charge of the city whilst the rest of Brit’n is still abed. He strides

the streets, he is Manager of all the offices in Threadaneedle street,

he is Chief Executive of London Transport and British Railways,

he is Superintendent of all the hospitals, he is Landlord of all the

mansions in Park Lane and Hampstead […] Instead of moaning

and groaning about his sorrows, he should stop and count these

blessings reserved solely for him […] As he banishes the filth and

litter, he could thunder out decrees in the Houses of Parliament and

his voice would ring through the corridors and change the

Immigration Act and the policies of the Racial Board (5-6).

See Nail, The Figure of the Migrant, ch. 1, on how urban environments are

maintained through the invisible labor of migrant workers.

Moses reimagines the relegation of black people – specifically, black men – to the

most arduous, least well-paid jobs, as a privilege, rather than an injustice. Their

relationship to time, i.e., the fact that they are forced to take the types of jobs that

require them to get up early in the morning, to be “the first passenger of the day”

(ibid.) on the bus (as Adella is), as well as the driver of that bus, gives them, in

Moses’ construction, free rein over the sleeping city. In reimagining black men’s

occupation of space, Moses installs them in positions of authority over the city

and its institutions: finance, transportation, hospitals, and private property

ownership all become the province of the black man by virtue of his sole presence

in the city. As Moses also shows, however, this unencumbered occupation of

space does not bring with it any real power; though his archetypal black man can

“thunder out decrees” against the racist policies of the state, those words have no

effect. Presence in space is not enough to convey belonging or ownership of that

space, despite Moses’ extended satirization of the raced conditions of labor that

deprivilege black subjects and relegate them to certain modes of inhabiting

time/space.

In contrast to this representation of black men working in public space,

Selvon articulates Moses’ view of the gendered nature of domestic space as the

province of women. Though he does have Bob to do work for him so that he can

present himself as an intellectual and avoid domestic labor, Moses also

contemplates having a woman in the house when Brenda, a politically active

black British woman, is in need of a room:

I begin to think now about the advantages of having a regular

woman about the house. I am not getting any younger, and cannot

hustle pussy and scout the streets of London as in days of yore.

[…] Since I acquire my property I does just like to come home and

cool it. […] Strokes aside, there was several duties she could

perform […] There’s nothing like a woman’s touch about the

house. A vase of flowers here, a straightening of the bed sheet

there – I don’t have to elaborate (26).

In this passage, Selvon represents Moses voicing a highly gendered construction

of dwelling in domestic space. Moses is entirely concerned with the benefits that

he will accrue from the presence of a woman in the house, which presence,

furthermore, he construes as providing sexual and aesthetic benefits for him. The

convenience of having a woman in the house will spare Moses the trouble of

having to go out into the city streets to look for women, something he is less wont

to do now that he has private property into which he can retreat, his underlying

assumption being that Brenda’s presence in the house will automatically result in

sexual encounters with Moses. The further assumption Moses makes, that Brenda

will perform domestic chores beautifying the house – an assumption so widely

shared and culturally ingrained that he does not feel the need to elaborate upon it

– is likewise the product of his reading of the connection between domestic space

and gender as naturalized and essential. As Selvon’s narrative unfolds, however,

Moses finds that he gets less than he bargained for: Brenda is interested in holding

Black Power meetings in the basement, not catering to Moses’ sexual desires or

doing household chores. Where Moses thinks that he can buy into black British

national belonging by acquiring social status as a property owner, and by

reproducing the heteronormative assumptions about how gendered social operate

within domestic space, Brenda defies Moses’ expectations about women’s place

in the home, and instead organizes fellow activists in the pursuit of challenging

national racism.

In addition to satirizing gendered divisions of domestic space, Selvon also

satirizes metropolitan racism, by depicting Moses’ house as a metaphor for the

Commonwealth. In portraying various characters in the novel, Selvon constantly

toggles between emphasizing difference and arguing for the commonality of

shared imperial history. Unlike Adella’s house, which was inhabited solely by

West Indians, Moses’ house is occupied by migrants from across the former

British Empire: Flo from Barbados; Alfonso from Cyprus; Ojo from an

unspecified African nation; Macpherson from Australia; Faizull and Farouk from

Pakistan. Selvon uses the demographic makeup of Moses’ house to comment

upon both the legacy of empire, and the changes wrought by its dismantling.

Upon hearing that Ojo is from Africa, Moses comments that “Africa is a big

country,” prompting Bob to clarify that he is from “Bangla-desh or one of them

new States” (32). Though Selvon presents both Moses and Bob as ignorant of

geopolitics, he also emphasizes that they are in a transitional period in which the

former boundaries and national designations are being replaced by new

constructions of identity and belonging, the very fact of which transformation

reveals the tenuous nature of geographically derived identity and the porousness

of national boundaries. Moses’ reaction to learning the origins of his tenants is

also telling: “It looks like you clutter up the house with a lot of foreigners,” he

complains to Bob; “Have we no genuine English stock?” (ibid.). Moses

recapitulates the racist arguments promulgated by political organizations such as

the National Front, which take an essentialist view of national belonging. Much as

he envisioned himself refusing to rent to black tenants in his fantasy of

landlordship, Moses again reproduces racism as a means of asserting his own

belonging in England. Though, superficially, the incongruity of a black immigrant

character voicing his preference for white English-born tenants might seem

simply incongruous, Selvon’s satire cuts a bit deeper by representing the racist

attitude exemplified in Moses’ narrow construction of national belonging as an

intrinsic characteristic of Englishness itself.

Although he does not claim to be of “genuine English stock” himself,

Moses does see himself as British and asserts his belonging in England by

naturalizing his presence in national space. Thinking back on his time in England,

Moses reflects, “I have weathered many a storm in Brit’n, and men will tell you

that in my own way I am as much a part of the London landscape as little Eros

with his bow and arrow in Piccadilly, or one-eye Nelson with his column in

Trafalgar Square, not counting colour” (44). By placing himself in the company

of official national landmarks, while at the same time lampooning those same

landmarks, Moses both asserts his belonging in London and identifies the racial

difference that continues to bar him from being fully integrated into English

society.

This belonging is tested, however, when Moses accidentally attends a

Black Power rally in Trafalgar Square, which leads to police suppression and

Moses’ own arrest. This time, Moses imagines the statue of Nelson “wondering

why the arse a regiment of artillery don’t just sweep across the square and wipe

them off the face of Brit’n” (35). In imagining Nelson’s views on the black

population amassed in Britain to be hostile, Moses voices white nationalist

prejudices against the presence of black people in the “fair country” (ibid.) and

raises the specter of official violence that targets and removes black people.

Selvon’s use of the word “fair” here brings into direct opposition the two

conflicting approaches to that black presence, and two conflicting views of what

makes England English: is it more important for England to be “fair,” as in just,

or “fair,” as in white?

Given the police response to the presence of black people in the Square,

Selvon seems to be indicating that whiteness, rather than justice, motivates

governmental policy and action. The presence of black people uniting collectively

around race as a political force and shared identity activates an official response

that regulates public space and disperses black bodies. Transported to jail in a

police van, Moses reflects that he and his fellow black prisoners are mute and

helpless “Like we was in the hold of a slave ship” (36). This is one of the few

instances in which Selvon references slavery directly, and the effect is all the

more striking as a moment of gravity in a largely humorous narrative. By linking

the space of the police van to the hold of a slave ship, Selvon illustrates the

parallels between imperial control of black bodies and their forced mobility

during slavery, and the continued control of black mobility under the

contemporary state. Containment and involuntary transport, rather than the right

to occupy space and to move through it freely thus characterize the history of

British control over black people seeking national belonging under empire.

While his friend Galahad responds to the state oppression of black people

by organizing political action and seeking belonging in the black community,

Moses views his own house as a private stronghold from which he can escape

public space and social ties. Berating Moses for his retreat into the isolation of

private space, Galahad cries, “You start already to deny our countrymen! As soon

as a black man start to get out of the ghetto and into the castle, he turn a blind eye

to the struggle” (11). For Galahad, communal solidarity along racial lines, rather

than individual success, is only true measure of belonging, and the black nation,

rather than the British nation, is the one that matters. Moses, however, wishes that

domestic space could be a matter of individual choice and action, unencumbered

by the constraints of group identity, believing, “I didn’t have anything to do with

black power, nor white power, nor any fucking power but my own” (14). In

expressing his rejection of group belonging and his affirmation of individual will

and action, Moses affirms the individualist credo of liberal economics and rejects

collective identification and its mobilization of individuals in the service of shared

political goals. He criticizes Galahad’s presumption on another visit, observing,

“Note the invasion of my castle, note the intrusive, aggressive entrance […] the

annexing of a seat without invitation” (40). Like Galahad, Moses sees private

property as a space to be defended against invasion; the borders of inside and

outside need to be maintained, and ownership is what ensures rights. Though

Galahad believes that individual success and acquisition are spurious and

deleterious, Moses continues to think that individual success, measured in

possessing property and acquiring social status, are ways to perform national

belonging.

Like Riley, Selvon ends his novel with his protagonist deprived of his

former position as a homeowner, though his circumstances and the tone in which

they are represented are far less grim than those Adella faces. When Moses’ white

servant, Bob, has his girlfriend, Jeannie, move in, it spells the beginning of the

end of Moses’ reign as landlord. Jeannie has designs on Moses’ penthouse, which

come to pass when, after Bob catches Moses scrubbing Jeannie’s back in the

bathtub, Moses offers Bob the penthouse to assuage his feelings of betrayal.

Moses voices his move back into the basement in his usual dramatic terms: “Thus

are the mighty fallen, empires totter, monarchs de-throne and the walls of Pompeii

bite the dust,” Moses observes of his demotion to the basement, though he, unlike

Adella, is a landlord to the last, and derives “small consolation” from the fact that

“Messrs Robert and Jeannie were paying rent for the penthouse” (134). Unlike

Adella, Moses loses his house not as the result of structural forces outside of his

control, but as the consequence of his own actions, namely, “lusting for white

pussy” (ibid.). Moses thus retains the economic benefit of being a landlord, even

though he has lost the prestige he invested in his penthouse residence.

For Moses, the loss of his status and his penthouse, though disappointing,

are a blow to his ego, but he is no worse off at the end of the novel than at the

beginning. Though presumably he, like Adella, will lose the house to council

redevelopment plans one his lease is up, he knew that the house would be

demolished when he signed the lease; this eventuality is outside the scope of the

novel, however, and Selvon includes it at the novel’s opening seemingly for the

humor it provides, in contributing to the house’s comically faulty undesirability.

Riley made the loss of Adella’s house the central event in her novel; Selvon, by

contrast, foreshadows but does not depict the eventual loss of Moses’ house to

urban redevelopment, and he remains a landlord, with a landlord’s income, to the

end.

Selvon concludes the novel with Moses meditating on the prospect of

contriving to ensure that Jeannie will catch Bob having sex with Brenda, at which

point Moses imagines that he can “fling down the gauntlet” (140) and reclaim his

penthouse. By ending the book with the image of Moses plotting to retaliate

against Bob’s usurpation of the penthouse, Selvon emphasizes the importance of

masculine pride or honor for Moses, signaled by his recourse to the chivalric

motif of the gauntlet. This honor is very different from Adella’s desire for respect,

however, in that respect, for Adella, is the absence of censure, while pride, for

Moses, is the assertion of status and authority. It is only this particular position

that Moses finally cares about inhabiting, and the questions of group or national

belonging that occupy other characters in the novel are ones that he seeks to avoid

in his pursuit of personal honor.

Finally, Moses’ desire to become an author, as well as a landlord, deserves

mention. One could accuse Selvon of being flippant in portraying Moses’

obsession with owning property in order to enhance his personal status within the

heteronormative, racist structure of the state, and his desire to inhabit private

space so that he can be an author. However, being an author and contributing to

shared culture is one of the ways that the national imaginary is created. Though

Moses’ attempts to prove his mastery of white British culture may seem

laughable, when Selvon prompts us to laugh at Moses, he also forces us to

question why it is “funny” that a character schooled in the culture of his

colonizers should revere it and try to prove his own worth within its rubric of

value. On the other hand, Selvon also shows us how Moses’ valorization of

British national belonging through property ownership, and authorship, is a

tenuous prospect. Moses loses the penthouse status he so valued, and his memoirs

are never published. In contrast to the communal activity of the black activists,

like Galahad and Brenda, Moses, for all his assertions of being part of London’s

landscape, remains a solitary figure. He may consider himself to be part of the

place, but he does not really experience black British national belonging, or

homemaking, on more than a rhetorical level.

The gendering of domestic space, and its connection to other forms of

oppression inform the very different ways that Riley and Selvon write the gain

and loss of home ownership. For a man, such as Selvon’s Moses, the loss of his

house does not affect him at the level of the body or of social relationships; he is

represented as being little impacted by either of these ties. For a woman like

Riley’s Adella, embodiment is a source of oppression and destruction, and being

the subject of men’s desires does great violence to women’s ability to dwell

within both patriarchal social structures and built edifices, and even within the

body itself. The body as/and home are tenuous spaces policed by the threat of

violence and unable to house national belonging.

In comparing Selvon’s and Riley’s novels, the difference in their

protagonists’ genders is not the only significant distinction to note. The fact that a

decade-plus span of time separates the publication of Selvon’s novel from that of

Riley’s also has a significant effect on how the authors represent homemaking as

a metaphor for black British national belonging. Selvon, writing in the early to

mid-1970s, represents black British national belonging in the period following

widespread decolonization throughout the 1960s and 1970s, during the height of

anti-immigration hysteria in the UK; Riley writes during the 1980s, following

Thatcher’s implementation of the Right to Buy scheme. For Selvon, questions of

national belonging and immigration are thus particularly relevant to his depiction

of black British homemaking, while for Riley, the transition from “slum

clearance” and the construction of council housing, to homeownership regulated

through Right to Buy, implicitly inform her narrative. Though their novels

illustrate how the gendering of domestic space intersects differently with raced

and classed oppression, both Riley and Selvon represent achieving black British

national through homemaking as doomed to failure in their respective

contemporary political circumstances.

Windrush Subjects: Marriage, Middleclassness, and Domesticity as National

(Un)Belonging in Caryl Phillips The Final Passage and Andrea Levy’s Small

Island

In the previous chapter, I focused on the gendered quest for respectability,

which drove Adella’s desire for homeownership – a pursuit I argued was a form

of social control that uses domestic space to regulate women’s sexuality. I now

turn back to Wigley’s assertion that “Marriage is the reason for building a house”

(Wigley, 336) to emphasize how marriage, as a particular type of sexual

regulation, is imbricated in the structure of the privately-owned house. What

Wigley suggests is that the institution of marriage simultaneously implies a

relation of mastery over women and property: owning a home and having a wife

are yoked together. The house is the necessary site for the relation of marriage

that regulates sexual reproduction, prescribes gender roles, and configures

familial attachments through the authority of the state by regulating citizenship

and immigration, as well as access to social benefits.

Marriage is a key mediator

of the relations between individuals and the state, and domestic space is the place

where socialization into patriarchy unfolds. The term “household” conjoins the

built structure of the house with the social structure of the family that inhabits it,

compressing the material and the interpersonal into a single social unit, one

which, as I go on to argue, is assumed to be the very foundation of the nation

itself.

In addition to Wigley, see Illouz and Coontz for various analyses of the social

function of marriage.

I turn now to focus on two novels written by first-generation black British

writers, Caryl Phillips and Andrea Levy to explore more explicitly how

patriarchal domesticity and racially-mediated national belonging intersect through

marriage. Written almost two decades apart, Philips’ 1985 novel The Final

Passage and Andrea Levy’s 2004 novel Small Island both look back to the

Windrush era – the postwar period of West Indian migration to the UK. While

both novels represent the same time period, their representations of this iconic era

differ significantly. I concur with James Proctor in reading the notable

sociopolitical differences in the contemporary moments during which Phillips and

Levy respectively write as profoundly influencing their perspectives on the same

set of historical events.

The focus of my particular argument, however, is that

the ways that the authors differ in their representations of homemaking,

specifically, reflects their views on the possibility, and desirability, of black

British national belonging. Though both Phillips and Levy depict women

protagonists who attempt to belong in England by engaging in middle-class

practices of homemaking, in Phillips’ novel, it is a failed attempt, while Levy’s,

written twenty years later, shows it to be a (qualified) success. Both novels

portray the performance of domestic practices as gendered, shaped by raced and

classed hierarchies, and rooted in the legacies of enslavement. While Phillips

presents middle-class homemaking as confinement from which his protagonist,

Leila, eventually wishes to escape, for Levy’s Hortense it represents a system that

can be leveraged for personal success.

See Proctor’s book chapter, “Recalibrating the Past: the Rise of Black British

Historical Fiction,” in which he makes this argument.

100

Because the Windrush era has come to function as the origin story for

contemporary black Britishness, Phillips’ and Levy’s historicization of that iconic

moment negotiates the relationship between the black British imagined

community and the nation at large. Re-presenting history is a way of determining

how to understand the present, and anticipate the future. It also allows us to

understand how traces of the past reverberate in the present. Phillips’ novel takes

a pessimistic view of the possibilities for belonging available to black subjects.

Levy, by contrast, optimistically shows her characters achieving homeownership

and avowing their commitment to being British, despite the racist attitudes and

laws of the society in which they live. History thus functions as a way of

refracting the past to understand the present: Phillips accounts for the alienation of

his contemporary moment by showing that the arid soil of Windrush-era Britain

did not allow any seeds of black Britishness to take root, while Levy represents

the ground as weed-ridden but ultimately fruitful after some hard work and

judicious pruning.

While both Phillips and Levy turn to the history of the Windrush arrival,

their novels represent that history very differently, reflecting differences in the

novels’ respective contemporary contexts. Phillips’ The Final Passage was

published during the Thatcher years, when the violence of the state was

manifesting itself through ever more exclusionary policies in housing, schooling,

and welfare provisions, especially for so-called “immigrant” populations. The

1981 British Nationality Act, representative of these policies, removed subject

status from Commonwealth residents in predominantly non-white areas of the

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former empire, and imposed restrictions on retention and acquisition of British

nationality, in an attempt to shore up racial homogeneity.

As I have discussed in

my introduction, the persistent racist and classist oppression of the 1980s political

landscape, in which Thatcher’s explicitly anti-socialist rhetoric cast the very idea

of collectivity in a negative light, created conditions in which the notion of

national belonging was reduced to private property ownership.

Writing in the

1980s, Phillips thus produces a much bleaker account of the possibilities of black

British national belonging than does Levy, who writes in the early twenty-first

century, a time when the Windrush arrival had been officially commemorated as

part of British history, and the rhetoric of New Labour’s multicultural politics had

momentarily obscured overt antiblack racism. Though cracks in the façade of late-

1990s era multiculturalism began manifesting in the decades to follow – a subject

I will address in chapter three – the turn of the millennium was, in comparison to

the bleakness of the Thatcher years, a moment of relative hope and prosperity,

and this optimism informs Levy’s representation of Windrush-era history.

Discussing the rise of black British historical fiction as a specifically post-

neoliberal phenomenon, James Proctor interrogates the motivation behind the

literary category, and poses two possibilities: the first is that it represents “a

retreat from the pressing racial politics of an earlier era, and a forgetting of the

current resonances of race”; the second is that it allows the writer to “critique and

establish continuities across […] the racialised boundaries between then and

See Layton-Henry, ch. 8.

I discuss this phenomenon in greater detail in chapter 3, when look at how

neoliberalism affects national belonging.

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now,” and thus “contest the cultural logic of late post-racial neo-liberalism”

(Proctor, 130).

In keeping with Proctor’s own reading of the effect of Phillips’

and Levy’s different contemporary climates on the Windrush-era novels they

write, I see Phillips’ novel as pessimistic about the persistence of racism – what

Proctor describes as “a narrative enactment of what history looks like without the

hope of change” (136) – while Levy’s, by contrast, is cautiously optimistic.

However, while Proctor reads Levy’s novel as primarily fostering “engagement

with rather than scepticism towards the past” (134), I argue that Levy’s novel

allows us to quarantine the ills of the past as something unpleasant that we have

passed, and which we are now beyond. Like Hortense at the end of the novel, we

leave the past behind and don’t look back once we have closed the book. Though

the voices of the novel’s multiple characters create a lively narrative that is indeed

engaging for the reader, the novel’s organizational structure and neatly resolved

plot presents a teleology of progress that relegates the history of colonialism to

the past. According to Proctor’s own schema, Phillips’ novel depicts and critiques

transtemporal racism, while Levy’s represents the racism of the past as something

which has been overcome, and which disappears as it is being represented: we are

shown the way things were as a way to avoid seeing the way things are. Though

Proctor rightly notes that Levy skillfully captures the breadth and

interconnectivity of British imperialism in the WWII era and just after the war, by

framing this history within an implicit narrative of progress, the reader is not

forced to contend with the ongoing legacy of racism in the present. Conversely,

See Proctor, “Recalibrating the Past: the Rise of Black British Historical

Fiction.”

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the ongoingness of racism is unavoidable in what Proctor aptly describes as the

“still, statuesque” narrative of Phillips’ novel, where the past is a weight one must

continue to carry (135).

In my analysis, I look beyond the fact of the diverging representations of

history in Phillips’ and Levy’s novels, and focus on how they represent

homemaking differently. If making and inhabiting home is the practice and sign

of national belonging for black British subjects, as I have been arguing, how are

homes imagined? What are the legible and recognizable practices that resist

exclusion? To contend with the legacies of British antiblack racism that position

them as perpetual foreigners, black British subjects like Phillips’ Leila and Levy’s

Hortense must perform a stereotyped, idealized form of middleclass Britishness to

assert national belonging. I go on to argue that both novels utilize tropes of

specifically middle-class domesticity as underwriting black British belonging.

Class, often expressed in terms of “respectability,” is inextricably connected to

racial categories, and to skin color. As both of the novels illustrate, class and race

in the Caribbean, as well as in the UK, inform ideologies of marriage and

domesticity: individuals are perceived as more or less desirable as spouses

according to their positions within these hierarchies. Given the relation between

marriage and citizenship, differential access to marriage and homemaking in their

ideal forms thus shapes who can be included within the imagined community of

the nation.

Homeownership, marriage, and national belonging: race and respectability

104

In Civilising Subjects, Catherine Hall argues that, in the 19th c., marriage

and property ownership were criteria of full subjecthood from which enslaved

persons were excluded.

According to Hall, following emancipation, abolitionists

advocated for the cultivation of marriage and property ownership as behaviors

that would “civilize” the formerly enslaved. Adopting white English domesticity

would make black subjects superficially resemble the white “respectable English

middle-class men” (Hall, 27) who were planting the flag of empire around the

globe, but would not grant them the same mobility or make them agents of

colonization. Middleclassness, as an ideal, was central to the formation of British

subjecthood. Promoting middleclass English patterns of marriage and

homemaking, post-emancipation, was a key way of conscripting black British

subjects into Britishness. It also simultaneously served to highlight the gap

between Englishness and Britishness that separated black Britons from white

ones.

However, the performance of even aspirational middleclassness through

marriage and homemaking was not equally available to all black subjects. Access

to material resources and social status varied in pre- and post-emancipation

Caribbean society, in ways that often tied class to skin color. Such social

structures that read skin color as a proxy for class, typically according to a

spectrum that equates darker skin color with lower class status, and lighter skin

See Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English

Imagination, 1830-1867; also see Cecilia A. Green, “A Civil Inconvenience: the

Vexed Question of Slave Marriage in the British West Indies.”

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with higher status, have come to be termed “pigmentocracies.”

In both Phillips’

and Levy’s novels, light skin privilege enables protagonists Leila and Hortense to

enter into the middleclass institution of marriage, which then allows them to

migrate to Britain. In England, however, they experience a very different

correlation between class and race. The novels thus illustrate how the

pigmentocractic structure of Caribbean society intersects with class hierarchies

and antiblack racism in England, yet differs from them.

“London is not my home”: England and unbelonging in The Final Passage

Although born in St. Kitts in 1958, Caryl Phillips migrated to England as

an infant. His position of simultaneous belonging in, and exclusion from, both St.

Kitts and Britain, and his feeling of being “not […] at home in either place”

reverberates in Phillips’ work and informs the critical lenses through which

scholars read it. Though Phillips has gone on to a successful literary career

following the publication of his first novel, The Final Passage, in 1985, reviews

at the time were mixed. Some reviewers found the narrative of The Final Passage

“confusing,”

“difficult for the reader to follow,”

and exhibiting the

The term appears to originate with Leo Kuper’s 1949 article “The South

African Native: Caste, Proletariat or Race?” It has since been taken up by

Caribbeanists as Gordon Lewis in articles such as “Race Relations in Britain: A

View from the Caribbean,” and Winston James, in “A Long Way From Home: On

Black Identity in Britain,” and “Migration, Racism and Identity: The Caribbean

Experience in Britain.”

See Shakespeare, “Migrant burden / Interview with novelist Caryl Phillips.”

See Best’s Financial Times review.

See Forbes, “Writing From The African Diaspora.”

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“weaknesses of a first novel.”

Others, however, disagreed, reading it instead as

the work of a “talented writer” with a “sharply observant eye,”

and foreseeing

that this “impressive debut”

100

heralded Phillips as a writer to watch. Whatever its

critical reception, Phillips considers his work an attempt to understand the history

of black people in Britain, and to achieve self-understanding.

101

In titling his novel The Final Passage, Phillips connects migration from

the Caribbean to England to the notoriously dangerous Middle Passage, the cross-

Atlantic journey from Africa to the Americas, and therefore to the history of

chattel slavery.

102

As Phillips’s novel makes clear, the legacies of slavery

reverberate in the present. Phillips’ representation of domestic spaces, particularly

those to which black people are relegated, intimately connects the present and

past of empire. By writing The Final Passage as the arrival in Britain of black

subjects descended from enslaved Africans, Phillips emphasizes the ongoing

relevance of these historical events.

The main plot of The Final Passage revolves around Leila and Michael’s

marriage and migration to the UK. The couple’s courtship, in defiance of Leila’s

mother, the spectacle of their wedding, the birth of their son, Calvin, and their

migration to England, constitute the main plot points leading up to their journey.

During this time, Leila breaks up with her boyfriend, Arthur, and Michael’s lover,

See Rubin, “Voyage Into Unknown Territory.”

See Nye, “Books: On the vanity of sexual wishes /Review of new fiction.”

100

See Livingstone, “A Life of Sun and Grey Drizzle.”

101

See Shakespeare’s interview with Phillips.

102

This extremely perilous passage cost an estimated 1.8 million captured

Africans their lives, and brought 10.6 million more to the New World colonies

and the brutal conditions of enslavement, see Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human

History, 5.

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Beverley, breaks up with him. The relationship of Leila’s best friend, Millie, and

her partner, Bradeth, provides a counterpoint to Leila and Michael’s marriage, and

Leila’s friendship with Millie is one of the most significant relationships in the

novel. Prior to Leila and Michael’s migration, Leila’s mother becomes ill, and

travels to England for medical care. Once in England, Leila and Michael struggle

to find housing. Michael looks for work, and begins staying away from home,

leaving Leila to look after their son alone. Leila’s mother dies. Leila forms a

shaky friendship with a white neighbor, and copes with intrusive visits from a

social services worker, but she feels increasingly isolated. The novel ends with

her yearning to go back to the Caribbean, as she imagines abandoning her

marriage and her futile attempts at heteronormative domesticity to live alongside

Millie and raise their children together.

Though it is called The Final Passage, the novel’s narrative emphasizes

the lack of finality and the ongoingness of racism. One of the ways it does so is by

presenting plot events out of sequence. Phillips complicates the very idea of

finality or linear progress by titling the first of the novel’s five subsections “The

End,” in which Leila waits for Michael on the dock as they prepare to board the

ship, and Millie helps Leila pack for her upcoming voyage. By beginning the

novel with Leila’s preparations for travel, Phillips seems to foreground mobility.

But a careful reading reveals that the text represents migration through scenes of

stasis: Leila waiting on the dock to board the ship; the seemingly interminable

ocean voyage. The actual conclusion to the novel – Leila’s imagined return to the

Caribbean and reunion with her friend – rejects the very finality that the title

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proclaims. Instead, Phillips writes against notions of linear progress, especially

with respect to race relations in England, in Leila’s rejection of British national

belonging. Phillips’ portrayal of her imagined return home illustrates Carole

Boyce Davies’ formulation of diasporic Caribbean space as characterized by

movement, flexibility, and portability, in contrast to static conceptions of identity

that are strictly geographically bounded.

103

Circular movement and cyclical time,

rather than linear spatial and temporal “progress,” characterize Phillips’ novel.

Phillips’ representation of Leila’s marriage and migration to the UK, and

her failure to achieve national belonging through homemaking, demonstrates how

ideals of middleclassness are valued as markers of social success, and why they

ultimately fall short of the success that they seem to promise. The novel charts

Leila’s transition from a girl following her mother’s orders, into a woman who

knows her own mind. It also tracks the shift in her positioning as the relatively

privileged “white girl” (Phillips, 47) in the Caribbean, to being read as a working-

class black woman once she is in the UK. Both of these shifts in perspective and

circumstance reflect Leila’s ultimate rejection of (and exclusion from)

middleclass marital domesticity in the imperial metropole, and her choice to

return to the Caribbean and to her chosen affiliative kinship there.

The first half of the novel, in which Leila marries Michael and prepares to

migrate, establishes middleclass domesticity as desirable objectives, and positions

Leila as advantageously placed to access them. Indeed, the second, and by far the

longest subsection of the novel, which portrays life in on the island prior to Leila

103

See Davies, Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight Zones.

109

and Michael’s migration, is evocatively titled “Home,” which might seem to refer

to domestic space. However, Phillips’ novel carefully distinguishes houses from

home: the former are artifacts of the built environment, shaped by the material

contingencies of poverty under imperialism; the latter refers to a sense of

belonging rooted in connection to place, exemplified in Millie’s expression of

affection for the island as “home,” because “home is where you feel a welcome”

(Phillips, 115). But though Millie champions the island as home, as I will explore

later in the chapter, the production of domestic space – and the limitations to such

a production – as a manifestation of class and respectability takes precedence in

the novel. In particular, Leila’s mother takes great care to construct her only child

as a middleclass subject, and to spare her the deprivation and sexual exploitation

that she herself has suffered. A “dark, almost black woman” (32), Leila’s mother

has not grown up with the (relative) material advantages that Leila appears to

accrue for being light skinned and for having a white father who pays for her

upbringing. To protect Leila and to enable her to make the most of her social

advantages, Leila’s mother disciplines Leila into going to school, where she

becomes a top student, and aggressively polices her sexuality and social life to

ensure that Leila is seen as a “respectable” girl.

Phillips demonstrates how domestic space reproduces and regulates social

relationships in his brief but telling description of Leila’s mother’s house. We first

see Leila’s mother sitting in the main room of the house she and Leila share “as if

courting misery” (31). The house lacks any decorative embellishments: “There

were no pictures on the bare walls, no carpets on the wooden floors, and at the

110

back of a long, thin room stood two attentive doors. The door to the left led into

Leila’s room, the door to the right to her mother’s, but in this one rectangular

room they cooked, ate, talked and read” (31-2). It is noteworthy that despite its

bareness, there are books on the table in the middle of the room, indicating a level

of social capital and the education that Leila’s mother values and that Leila has

attained. The books are the only items in the house that are not necessary for mere

survival. The pervasiveness of Leila’s mother’s influence, and the strictness of her

discipline are manifest in Phillips’ representation of Leila’s mother’s house as a

space of tightly regulated social relations. In this cloistered and airless space,

Leila’s mother can police her daughter’s social interactions, in an attempt to

protect Leila from the abuse that she herself suffered. Leila experiences this

protectiveness as a form of imprisonment, and it is only by riding with Michael on

his motorbike that Leila is able to escape from her mother’s house and to feel a

sense of “freedom” (30). Ironically, this momentary freedom from her mother’s

oppressive oversight leads to the equally oppressive domesticity of her marriage

to Michael, as Leila soon discovers.

In portraying Leila and Michael’s marriage as an unusual and noteworthy

event, Phillips emphasizes how the marriage is “read” by those attending the

celebration. For everyone present, Leila is a fortunate middleclass girl—light-

skinned, educated, and with a strict maternal upbringing bordering on the

puritanical. By marrying Michael, Leila is viewed as “marrying beneath herself,”

and thus frittering away her considerable social advantages. When she hears that

Leila has chosen to marry Michael instead of her former boyfriend, Arthur,

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Leila’s mother does not hold back her disapproval and dismay: “the boy from

Sandy Bay is no good […] He don’t even have a job […] I don’t bring up no blind

child. I mean, why a girl like you want to marry to such a man? I just don’t

understand” (34). Leila’s mother’s reaction to Leila’s decision to marry a poor,

dark-skinned man of little education and few prospects is echoed by the

townspeople eagerly attending the wedding: “Most people thought Leila was too

good for Michael” (48), and they all crowd the church for the spectacle of “a poor

boy from this village […] marrying the mulatto girl from St. Patrick’s. He had

done well for himself and they waited with anxiety” (49). Differences in class

produced through the combination of social capital – skin color, employment,

and residence – divide Leila and Michael from the beginning. Where Michael

gains social status by “marrying light,”

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Leila, as her mother and the

townspeople indicate, has chosen downward mobility. As Leila’s mother’s makes

clear in voicing her disapproval, Leila could have leveraged her social advantages

by marrying someone like Arthur, who is studying in the US. Nonetheless, the

public spectacle of her church wedding produces Leila as a “respectable” married

woman, and despite the social disparities between the bride and groom, the

wedding is seen as an achievement for that reason.

Leila’s social “respectability” is what signifies that Michael has in fact

“done well” for himself. Rather than following local tradition, the wedding

adheres to a British-inspired ceremony: “The service was as her mother had

104

See Henriques, 51, qts. orig., on the perceived desirability of light skin color in

the selection of spouses, as a means of raising one’s own and one’s children’s

class position.

112

wanted it, strictly conventional, with Leila dressed from head to foot in a lacy

white dress” (48-9). The conventionality of the wedding is symbolized by the

now-iconic image of the white wedding dress, which evokes both the moral codes

and the imperial history of its Victorian roots. By contrast, the rituals that have

been excluded from the ceremony – “there was no string band, and nobody

danced or sang in the street, and nobody walked with the wedding cake firmly

balanced on their head” (48) – which symbolize the carnivalesque aspects of her

Caribbean heritage are omitted in an attempt to downplay the racial and cultural

heritage she shares with the townspeople, and an attempt to amplify Leila’s

“whiteness” as what sets her apart from them.

Phillips also draws a sharp contrast between the performance of middle-

class homemaking and alternative forms of domestic and personal relations

through his depiction of the two women in Michael’s life: Leila, and his lover,

Beverley. Friendless and without family, Beverley seems to expect “nothing of

this world except a clean house, her child’s health, and her breath in her body”

(45): other than ensuring her own survival, Beverley’s only focus is on the bare

maintenance of her domestic space and the family it contains, which includes her

son and Michael, whenever he chooses to drop in. The sparseness of the house

itself reflects this narrow focus: “empty, like the inside of a packing case,” it is

“just one room, with a small bedroom created by a hanging curtain” (ibid); later,

Phillips describes it as “more like a discarded warehouse than a place for living

in” (84). While Beverley’s house is as sparsely furnished as Leila’s mother’s

house, it is important to note that Phillips emphasizes the bareness of Leila’s

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mother’s house to highlight the strictness of her moral discipline, while he

portrays the emptiness of Beverley’s house to underscore her material

deprivation. By likening Beverley’s house to an “empty packing case” or

“discarded warehouse,” Phillips emphasizes that it is a space for storing objects

rather than housing people. It is a sharp reminder of the history of the Caribbean

as a site of imperial production where people were treated as disposable objects.

The image of the empty packing case, rather than the items it would have

contained, likewise reflects the history of the Caribbean as a site of resource

extraction and commodity production, while wealth accumulation and

consumption occurred overseas. Extreme poverty has shaped Beverley’s “house,”

illustrating how the cultivation of middle-class domesticity depends upon marital

ties and material resources: without a husband, the pretenses of middleclassness

are neither financially available nor socially necessary for Beverley.

However, unlike Leila, Beverley is the head of her own household, and

controls access to domestic space. Being husbandless and friendless positions

Beverley on the margins of society, but also allows her a certain kind of freedom

from the restraints that social ties and prescribed roles impose. When Michael

makes the mistake of bringing Leila’s baby, Calvin, into Beverley’s house, she

orders Michael out, and then “slap[s] him hard across the face, knocking him

slightly off balance” (85). The next day, Michael returns to find that, for the first

time, Beverley has locked the door on him. Beverley is able to exercise control

over her own domestic space because she and Michael are not married; unbound

by the social expectations of marriage, she caters to Michael’s physical desires

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because they align with her own, but does not feel compelled to obey him or

allow him access to her home. Unlike Riley’s Adella, who is dependent upon men

for shelter, Beverley manages to provide for herself and thus regulate access to

her domicile.

Phillips’ portrayal of Beverley’s boundary-setting contrasts with his

depiction of Leila’s investment in middleclass homemaking. However, once they

migrate to England, the pressure of British racism, most concretely manifested in

the housing market, causes Leila’s and Michael’s already unstable relationship to

crumble. In the fourth section of the novel, “The Passage,” they look for

accommodations, and quickly discover that the rental situation for black tenants is

bleak. By grouping the depiction of the actual ocean passage itself with scenes of

Leila and Michael’s attempts to find lodging in this section, Phillips implies that

navigating a hostile English society is part of the ongoing “passage” that only

begins with the journey of migration itself: negotiating everyday racism in their

search for housing is the continuation of that metaphorical passage within a social

structure that marks West Indian subjects not only as perpetual foreigners, but as

the unwanted. The fact that they all share the “same flag, […] same empire”

(142), as fellow passengers on the ship remark, does not grant them entry to

domestic space or national belonging in England. Signs proclaiming “‘No

vacancies for coloureds’ ‘No blacks’” (156) clearly bar the family from

occupying some properties, while deferrals, such as the claims, “‘I can’t make any

decision till I’ve talked with my husband […] It was the future that we were

thinking of […] we just can’t help you at this particular moment,’” issuing from a

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white woman who “smiled, or rather beamed, as she closed the door” (156)

constitute more subtle forms of discrimination.

105

These smiling rebuffs

perpetuate the racist obstruction of black subjects from inhabiting domestic space

and achieving national belonging, both by blocking their access to housing, and

by making clear that they are unwelcome. As Leila’s mother reminds her,

“London is not my home […] And I don’t want you to forget that either” (124).

Despite her mother’s warnings about attempting to belong in such a

hostile environment, Leila persists in pursuing homemaking under the conditions

available in England. A chance encounter with a nurse caring for Leila’s mother

leads to the opportunity to lease a flat, and Leila takes on the responsibility of

going to the estate agent and signing the lease. Phillips conveys the importance of

the act of signing the lease and acquiring the right to reside in their own flat

through his description of Leila “mak[ing] sure that her writing was more than

just a name, it was a signature” (160). In finding the flat and signing for it, Leila

asserts her independence, and makes herself socially – and legally – legible as a

subject. The written signature asserts her legal and social personhood in a way

that a name does not. Though the house proves unsuitable, signing for it herself is

Leila’s first act of independence from Michael, and a declaration of her ability to

participate in the social institutions that determine value in the UK.

When Leila and Michael go to the house, what they find is far beneath

their expectations: a filthy house with broken windows, jammed between the

railway bridge and a brick wall. After examining the house in disgust, Michael

105

See Glass for an in-depth analysis of housing racism in the Windrush era.

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tasks Leila with its cleanup, issuing the ultimatum, “I don’t expect to find the

place like this when I come back” (162). His role as husband allows him to issue

such demands; hers as wife compels her to attend to the house and to heed her

husband. Leila spends all day cleaning “until every muscle in her body ache[s]”:

The cupboard doors were either put back on their old hinges or

taken off completely. It looked neater that way. The windows were

washed and the floor swept clean. She found an old bedspread

which she draped over the settee in the front room. It was now

alright to sit on. Leila gave the crooked shaven table a tablecloth

for a companion, and around it there stood three proud but shaky

wooden chairs […] In the bedroom the mattress was now covered

with a bedspread, with sheets, with blankets. The two pillows were

in pillowcases. The broken panes were neatly covered by

cardboard. The panes that were intact were clean. The room had

curtains and a lampshade, it had a bedside table and a cot for

Calvin (164-5).

Though Leila washes windows and sweeps the floor, she does more than clean the

house: she makes it a proper home through her attention to matters of décor. The

seeming need for a tablecloth and other similar homemaking accouterments that,

in her mind, make the ramshackle flat a “home” also betray her compulsion to be

a “proper” homemaker. Removing some of the cupboard doors “look[s] neater”;

covering the settee with a bedspread makes it “alright to sit on.” Neither of these

actions has to do with cleaning in the sense of removing dirt; instead, they tidy the

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appearance of the house, “cleaning” the visual field. Similarly, covering the table

with a tablecloth and dressing the bed and pillows in layers of linens are actions

that create a visual effect in addition to serving a practical purpose. The way that

Phillips carefully itemizes the layers of specific bed linens provides a sharp

contrast between Leila’s adherence to a classed protocol of making a bed, and the

unmade bed in Beverley’s house, where necessity, practicality, and above all,

scarcity motivate her housekeeping. Phillips’ anthropomorphizing of the table and

chairs animates the furniture in anticipation of the house’s function as the site

where family relationships will unfold; the inanimate furniture is endowed with

the future life of the family that the space of he house makes possible. For Leila,

cleaning is not enough; she must make the house into a middleclass home.

Classed expectations about homemaking converge with, and support,

gendered hegemony in the house. Though Leila takes charge of the homemaking,

she does so in response to Michael’s dictates: his role as the husband gives him

ultimate authority as the head of the household, although it is Leila who manages

the house. Phillips illustrates how, under patriarchy, Michael’s role as head of the

household entail his marital “rights” over both the house and his wife’s body by

linking the two metaphorically. Realizing that Michael has forgotten his key,

Leila leaves the door open for him (164), a mark of her admission of his right as

husband to enter the marital home, in contrast to the earlier scene in which

Beverley asserts her authority over her own space by locking Michael out.

Michael’s drunkenly attempts to rouse Leila and have sex, continuing even when

she does not answer; she is actually awake, but pretends to be asleep, and does not

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stop Michael from having sex with her, “forc[ing] his hand down between her

legs and pris[ing] them open” (165) in an act of violence reminiscent of the way

he loudly crashes through the front door, without a thought for the sleeping baby

upstairs. Michael assumes his right to enter Leila’s body as much as he presumes

his right to enter the domestic space of the house. In Phillips’ representation,

Leila’s body is likened to the domestic space of the house, and Michael violently

asserts his “rights” over both. Much as Riley does in her representation of

Adella’s marriage to Stanton, Phillips depicts, and critiques, the gendered

violence and imbalance of power inherent in the marital roles of husband and

wife: though both Adella and Leila anticipate, and on some level accept, their

husbands’ violence, the novels expose marital violence as violence, and write

against the social attitudes that normalize such abuse within marriage.

In his depiction of Leila’s friends, Millie and Bradeth, Phillips offers an

alternative version of interpersonal relationships and domestic space, outside the

conventions of marriage and formal property ownership or leasing. Millie gets

pregnant, and although Bradeth does not immediately agree to marriage, they

continue to live together and raise their daughter, sharing a strong bond based on

mutual respect, rather than simply adhering to a conventional ritual. Their

approach to domestic space is likewise practical rather than formal. When

Michael and Leila are preparing to leave for England, Bradeth tells Michael, “we

going to take over the shop now [Millie’s aunt] Toosie dead” (93). Without

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signing a lease or entering into an official arrangement, they assert their right to

occupy the shop simply by doing so, based on its availability and their need.

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Unlike Leila, who does not explicitly voice a particular ideology with

regard to property ownership, Michael looks forward to the “car and a big house

and a bit of power under [his] belt” that he believes he can acquire only by

migrating to England. To him, the Caribbean is a place that “breed[s] too many

people who just cut cane in season and happy to be rum-jumbie out of it”

(Phillips, 103). Millie, on the other hand, responds by critiquing the capitalistic

and individualistic worldview he espouses, which lays blame for endemic poverty

on individuals and their lack of personal ambition. When Leila asks her when she

and Bradeth will come to England, Millie questions the assumption that going to

England is necessary or even desirable, declaring, “I love this island with every

bone in my body. It’s small and poor, and all the rest of the things that you and

Michael probably think is wrong with it, but for all that I still love it. It’s my

home and home is where you feel a welcome” (115). Millie stands up for the

value of the island as a place of belonging, refusing to see it through the lens of

deprivation that others employ. Her definition of home is rooted in the affective

experience of belonging that manifests in “feeling a welcome.” Phillips thus

contrasts Michael’s capitalist values – and his desire to migrate to the UK to

realize them – with Millie’s collectivist approach to belonging in the Caribbean.

106

See Forbes, “Between Plot and Plantation,” wherein she argues that informal

practices of occupying domestic space in the Caribbean can be understood as a

resistance to imperialism, and that these forms of domesticity deprivilege

individual ownership and privilege communal needs.

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Leila comes to regret her choice of moving to England, and thinks back to

Millie’s definition of home and imagines going back to a place where she too will

find a welcome, living on the island amongst friends. At the very end of the novel,

in the section “Winter,” Leila imagines going back to the island with her young

son, Calvin and her second, as yet unborn child, whom she imagines growing up

and going off to England to look for Michael: “She would continue to wait for

them, holding Millie’s hand, both their hair grey and hidden (Bradeth also grey, at

home, waiting for Millie), knowing that being her boys […] they would come

back to her with the next tide” (204). Longing for home while inhabiting cold,

lonely England, Leila imagines a future for herself in which she leaves her

husband for the affiliative kinship offered by her friend Millie. By discarding the

need to belong within the confines of the English nationstate, Leila also lets go of

the related ties of property ownership and marriage, and is able to think about

homemaking differently. Rejecting inhospitable Britain, she affirms that her true

home is where affection and cooperation determine relatedness, and where there

is still the opportunity to occupy domestic space informally, outside of the

constraints of the real estate market.

“England became my destiny”: Homemaking and History as “Progress” in Small

Island

Where Phillips explores heterosexual marriage and homemaking to

indicate their failure to underwrite meaningful or sustainable belonging, Levy

appears to represent bourgeois marriage and homemaking as the key to national

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belonging. Levy’s own parents migrated from the Caribbean during the Windrush

era – in her father’s case, on the SS Empire Windrush itself – and she was born in

London in 1956.

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Unlike Phillips, whose The Final Passage appeared at the

outset of his career, Levy was already an established writer when Small Island

was published in 2004, following her previous works Every Light in the House

Burnin’ (1994), Never Far From Nowhere (1996), and Fruit of the Lemon (1999).

Small Island, Levy’s fourth novel, was a critical and popular success; it won

multiple awards, and was eventually adapted into a TV miniseries. Not all

reviewers embraced the novel, however: one dismissed it as “a trite, sentimental

tale about childhood in the West Indies”

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; another felt it at times

“overplotted.”

109

Nonetheless, positive reviews far outweighed such comments:

reviewers have praised the novel as “captivating”

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; an “enthralling tour de force

that animates a chapter in the history of empire”

111

; a “superb” book that “tackles

many complex issues”

112

; “subtle” and “true to life” in its depictions of the

intersection of imperialism, race and class

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; and “a masterful depiction of a

society on the verge of major changes.”

114

107

See Levy’s author page, currently maintained despite her recent death from

breast cancer on February 14, 2019, for a brief biography and catalogue of her

work and awards pertaining thereto: www.andrealevy.co.uk/author/, accessed 20

August 2019.

108

See Law for an egregious misreading that substantiates his admission of not

having finished the book.

109

See Olivenbaum, “Small Island,” in Greenberg et. al.

110

See “Small Island,” Publishers’ Weekly.

111

See “Levy, Andrea: Small Island,” Kirkus Reviews.

112

See Vander Kloet et al., “Small Island.”

113

See Fatema Ahmed, “Postcolonials.”

114

See Starr Smith, “Small Island: A Novel.”

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As several reviewers have observed, much of the success of Levy’s novel

stems from its nuanced depiction of racial tensions, decolonization, migration,

and class that exceeds a simplistic black/white binary. Though Levy’s novel

certainly accomplishes the task of avoiding reductive representations of race and

racism, it also has the effect of narrating racial conflict as history, as a past that

society has since moved beyond. Levy’s novel is thus unlike Phillips’, the title of

which invokes finality ironically, and represents the unfinishedness of history.

Rather than writing in the troubled 1980s, Levy’s writing emerges from the more

hopeful decade of 1990s-era institutional multiculturalism. By the time Small

Island was published in 2004, the fiftieth anniversary of the arrival of the SS

Empire Windrush had already been commemorated and written into history. The

publication, in 1998, of many books codifying Windrush history, placed the

Windrush generation firmly within contemporary British history, and reaffirmed

the importance of the Windrush narrative of arrival as the touchstone for black

British identity, as I have discussed in my introduction. While Phillips’ novel

looks backward to the Windrush era in order to make the legacy of enslavement

and imperialism visible in his contemporary moment of the 1980s, Levy’s

millennial novel represents Windrush as the origin story of black Britishness and

national multiculturalism.

Small Island is set explicitly in the Windrush era, with the narrative

divided into alternating sections marked “Before” and “1948,” thus emphasizing

the year of the Windrush’s arrival as a watershed moment. The novel is narrated

by four primary protagonists, one of whom, Jamaican ex-RAF airman Gilbert

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Joseph, literally boards that very ship after seeing a notice posted: “The Empire

Windrush, sailing on 28 May. The cost of the passage on this retired troop ship

was only twenty-eight pounds and ten shillings” (99). This is but one of many

instances in which Levy marks her text as an historical novel, one in which she

represents the history of the war, and its aftermath, across the British Empire –

Jamaica, England, and India. She also complicates representations of race and

class through inclusion of multiple first person narratives. In addition to Gilbert,

whose father is a white Jewish man, Levy represents the perspectives of light-

skinned, middleclass Jamaican Hortense Roberts; white Englishwoman Queenie

Buxton, a working-class butcher’s daughter; and Queenie’s husband, Bernard

Bligh, a white middleclass bank clerk. Through her representation of multiple

locations, and multiple viewpoints, Levy illustrates how intersections of race,

class, and culture differ contextually within the declining British Empire.

In this chapter, I restrict my analysis to Hortense’s marriage to Gilbert,

contrasting Levy’s representation of marriage, and its relationship to

pigmentocracy, middleclassness and homemaking with that of Phillips. The

threads of Levy’s complex plot relevant here include Hortense’s middleclass

upbringing in Jamaica; her marriage of convenience to Gilbert following WWII;

their migration to England; and their lodging in Queenie’s rooming house prior to

purchasing, at the novel’s end, their own home. Levy amply illustrates, much

more explicitly than Phillips, how pigmentocracy in the Caribbean structures

class, marriage, and domesticity. As a result of being born with lighter skin than

her mother, Alberta, or grandmother, Miss Jewel, Hortense has been brought up in

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her father’s cousin’s household as the peer of their son, Michael; her own

illiterate, dark-skinned grandmother acts as servant to her and calls her “Miss

Hortense,” while Hortense receives an education and graduates from the teachers’

college. Hortense is quite candid about how this particular form of privilege has

shaped her life circumstances. Comparing her skin to that of her father, a

government official, whom she describes as “a man of class. A man of character.

A man of intelligence” (37), she comments that her “complexion was as light as

his, the colour of warm honey. It was not the bitter chocolate hue of Alberta

[Hortense’s mother] and her mother. With such a countenance there was a chance

of a golden life for I” (38). Given her education, deportment, and professional

training, Hortense is bewildered when, in England, the English do not

acknowledge these accomplishments, much less attend to distinctions and

denotations of skin color that socially privilege her in Jamaica. When she applies

for a teaching position in England, not only is she laughed out of the room, white

Britons can barely understand her accent. Though she sees a vast difference

between herself and darker or less educated black British subjects, to white

Britons, the variations in skin shade and class that structure pigmentocracy in the

Caribbean are invisible in England.

While Hortense fails to interrogate the connection between skin color and

class privilege, Levy’s representation of how the two are intertwined in Jamaica

reveals the intimate connection between skin and status. When another pupil,

Celia Langley, befriends Hortense at teachers’ training college and brings up the

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necessity of fighting against Hitler’s racist ideology, Hortense dismisses this

consideration by contrasting Celia’s dark skin with her own:

I could understand why it was of the greatest importance to her that

slavery should not return. Her skin was so dark. But mine was not

of that hue – it was the colour of warm honey. No one would think

to enchain someone such as I. All the world knows what that

rousing anthem declares: “Britons never, never, never shall be

slaves” (72).

Hortense differentiates herself from Celia on the basis of skin color, accepting the

racist ideology that naturalizes the assumption that dark skin connotes servitude.

Light skin, by contrast, conveys an inherent exemption from servitude, within the

racist paradigm of white, and light-skinned, hegemony. Hortense’s repetition of

her self-description – skin the color of warm honey – bespeaks her sense of

personal pride and the importance she places on this inherited characteristic,

which, in the context of Caribbean history, ensures her privileged status. It also,

however, slips from the domain of the personal into an implied assertion of

national belonging. Hortense’s claim that her light skin would keep her from

slavery segues into her statement that “Britons” also cannot be enslaved, thus

implicitly connecting her light skin to her sense of her own Britishness. Doing so,

Hortense implicitly constructs dark-skinned Celia as un-British. Britishness, in

Hortense’s view, is bound up with skin color in a way that allows her, as a light-

skinned black woman to imagine being within the ambit of Britishness. It also

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allows her to exclude darker people such as Celia, despite the fact that they are

both equally subjects of empire.

Of greater significance, such a prejudice allows her to rationalize her

decision to steal Celia’s England-bound fiancé, Gilbert. After all, in Hortense’s

view, dark-skinned Celia cannot be fully British. Hortense effectively ends Celia

and Gilbert’s planned marriage and migration to England by bringing up the

subject of Celia’s mentally ill mother, the mention of whom dashes Celia’s

dreams of emigration. Despite the fact that Celia generously befriends and helps

Hortense upon her arrival at the teachers’ training school, for Hortense, her

friendship with Celia is one of temporary convenience, and she chooses to discard

it once it can no longer serve her. Rather than imagining an alternative to

heteronormative, bourgeois domesticity, which might include Celia, as Leila does

in her friendship with Millie, Hortense takes an instrumental view of human

relationships. Celia, a dark-skinned woman without property or prospects of her

own, is of little material value to Hortense. As such, she feels no compunction

replacing mere female friendship with the opportunity to marry, migrate, and

perform her Britishness.

Hortense’s marriage to Gilbert also clearly illustrates how the institution

of marriage regulates financial and domestic relationships. After clearing Celia

out of the way, Hortense secures Gilbert for herself by offering to pay his way to

England in exchange for marrying her. “I will lend you the money,” she tells him,

“we will be married and you will send for me to come to England when you have

a place for me to live” (100). It is thus fairer to say that Hortense proposes to

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Gilbert, and in her brief proposition, she astutely reveals the three foundations of

bourgeois belonging: money, house, and marriage. Though she provides the initial

funds necessary for Gilbert to go to England, she expects that he will provide a

house to live in, and until he is able to do so, she will not live with him. Marriage,

in Hortense’s mind, thus occasions a particular pattern of dwelling, but it is also

bound by normative gender roles: to expand Wigley’s assertion that marriage is

the foundation of patriarchal domesticity, even if marriage does not involve

literally building a house, it is still the reason for buying or renting a house.

Because going to England as a single woman does not fit into Hortense’s sense of

middleclass propriety – “A single woman cannot travel on her own – it would not

look good. But a married woman might go anywhere she pleased” (100) – she

requires that Gilbert partner with her in the venture of marriage. Within the

colonially-instilled norms of Christianized patriarchy, women’s social

respectability is presumed to depend on their marital status; thus, Hortense’s

strategy for migrating to England requires that she be married when she travels

and sets up home.

Levy highlights the contractual nature of traditional marriage by making

the terms of the marriage, and the reason for entering into it, explicit: Hortense

describes how Gilbert “shook my hand when I said yes, like a business deal had

been struck between us” (ibid.), because the marriage is a business deal. There is

little consideration of love, reproduction, or even sexual desire in Hortense’s

marriage proposal to Gilbert; the arrangement is set up as a partnership built on

finances, propriety, and property. Indeed, Hortense refuses to sleep with Gilbert

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on their wedding night, which they spend in cramped lodgings before he sails for

England. Unlike Leila, whose relationship with Michael is initially motivated in

large part by sexual desire and a desire to escape her mother’s control, Hortense’s

motivatation in forming her relationship with Gilbert is neither sexual, nor is her

adherence to norms of middle class propriety imposed on her by her family; it is

largely self-imposed. For Hortense, marriage is not marriage without a house, and

because Gilbert has yet to secure one, she therefore does not feel at all compelled

to perform sexually simply because they have been married.

However, not just any house will satisfy Hortense’s ideals of marital

domesticity; having what she believes to be the proper middle-class English house

is what animates Hortense. Upon accepting Gilbert’s marriage proposal, Hortense

imagines her life in England and the stereotypically perfect English domestic

space she assumes she will inhabit:

In the breath it took to exhale that one little word, England became

my destiny […] The house is modest – nothing fancy, no show –

the kitchen small but with everything I need to prepare meals. We

eat rice and peas on Sunday with chicken and corn, but in my

English kitchen roast meat with two vegetables and even fish and

chips bubble on the stove. My husband fixes the window that

sticks and the creaky board on the veranda. I sip hot tea by an open

window and look on my neighbours in the adjacent and opposite

dwelling. I walk to the shop where I am greeted with manners,

“Good day,” politeness, “A fine day today,” and refinement, “I

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trust you are well?” A red bus, a cold morning and daffodils

blooming with all the colours of the rainbow (100-1).

Hortense instantly transmutes the marriage proposal and acceptance into an

occasion to imagine the domestic space that she will occupy as a wife, and the

pattern of life that will be performed in that picture-perfect space. Gilbert will be

the caretaker, in charge of “masculine” home repair tasks, while she sips tea

genteelly by the window. The dinner has already been made, but we do not see

her labor, only its results, befitting a middleclass homemaker who serves meals in

a separate dining room, with “a dining table [and] starched tablecloth” (ibid.) The

“one little word” accepting the proposal is brushed aside by the detailed

description of the house that Hortense imagines her marriage will provide.

Hortense imagines a middle-class house – “nothing fancy, no show” – that

signifies modesty as a positive value. Her internalized assumptions about gender

and class also underwrite the fantasy of an idyllic house that, by extension,

signifies marriage.

But Hortense also hews to what she imagines to be a particularly English,

and specifically middleclass, version of domesticity in the types of foods she

envisages preparing: instead of the rice and peas, chicken, and corn eaten in

Jamaica, Hortense imagines cooking stereotypically English meals of “roast meat

and two vegetables” and “fish and chips.” On the one hand, Hortense has learned

how to name the meals that signify Englishness, to the degree that she can specify

“two vegetables” should be served with the dinner. As we learn when she arrives

in England to meet Gilbert, however, these signifiers of Englishness are abstract

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rather than fully real to her; when trying to prepare fish and chips, she boils the

potato pieces rather than frying them, and Gilbert must go out and purchase chips

for their dinner. Hortense also fails to realize that not all classes of English people

have access to luxuries like roast meat, especially in post-WWII London; her

vision of England presumes it to be an implicitly classless place, where somehow

everyone enjoys the comfort of middleclass abundance. Her vision of her

neighborhood and her account of how she will interact with her neighbors is

likewise drawn from her imagination of an ideal England: “hot tea” and “a red

bus” connote what is stereotypically English; the “cold morning” speaks to the

difference in climate; and the display of “manners” and “politeness” reflects the

type of valorized behavior Hortense has been taught to associate with the English,

and to emulate.

But her understanding of all of these elements is flawed, as we come to

learn when Hortense arrives in England and experiences variations in class,

language, and behavior, and particularly when she is the target of racism and

ignorance. Levy foreshadows Hortense’s misunderstanding of England by ending

her reverie on English domesticity with her anticipation of seeing “daffodils all

the colours of the rainbow.” Levy introduces the significance of daffodils as a

symbol of England and Englishness earlier in the text, when Celia and Hortense

are in school. Both girls are familiar with the Wordsworth poem “I wandered

lonely as a cloud,”

115

in which the daffodils are mentioned, but Celia advises

115

The Wordsworth Trust, an organization that fosters Wordsworth tourism,

asserts both that Wordsworth is “Britain’s most famous poet” and that “I

wandered lonely as a cloud” is “The most famous poem in the English language”;

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Hortense not to choose it for her elocution exercise, because the “daffodils [are]

too simple” (67). By contrast, Hortense’s efforts to teach her grandmother, Miss

Jewel, to recite the poem and thus learn ‘proper’ English do not produce the

results she desires, as Miss Jewel transforms the text of the poem into her own

diction of Jamaican patois. Levy thus establishes the daffodils as a symbol of

received Englishness, and shows how a specific literary curriculum at college has

been ideologically inculcated in them, while an uneducated woman like Miss

Jewel is able to rewrite Englishness into something relevant to her own

experience. Futhermore, Hortense has merely learned how to reproduce signifiers

of Englishness, but, as we see in her anticipation of daffodils “all the colours of

the rainbow,” she does not entirely understand their referents. Through these and

other slippages (the veranda in her imagined English cottage), Levy both

represents Hortense’s vision of English domesticity as an incomplete,

misunderstood, learned construct, while also articulating the interconnection of

domesticity and nationhood. It is only through painful lived experience that

Hortense emends her sunny notions of picturesque English life and comes to

realize that, in the words of her husband, Gilbert, “not everything that the English

do is good” (328).

One of the things that is definitely not good is the house itself. When

Hortense arrives in England, six months after Gilbert, she is dismayed by the

domestic space she is expected to occupy. Rather than the house she had been

debatable and self-interested as these claims might be, they are plausible given the

extensive use of the text as part of the British imperial curriculum. See

wordsworth.org.uk/wordsworth/daffodils-and-other-poems/

accessed 14 Dec. 2019.

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hoping for, with its modestly genteel dining room, suitable kitchen, and pleasant

neighbors, she finds that Gilbert has secured the rent of a single shabby room in a

lodging house:

Three steps would take me to one side of the room. Four steps

could take me to another. There was a sink in the corner, a rusty

tap stuck out from the wall above it. There was a table with two

chairs – one with its back broken – pushed up against the bed. The

armchair held a shopping bag, a pyjama top, and a teapot […] “Just

this? This is where you are living? Just this?” (21).

The respectability that Hortense thought she could achieve through marriage and

migration is undone by the conditions in which she is expected to live. One room

in a lodging house does not provide the space necessary for Hortense to perform

the middle-class domesticity that she had envisioned, and thus does not allow her

to inhabit the England that she had imagined she would find. Lodging implies

stuckness, temporariness, and lack of control over one’s dwelling space; the term

is also haunted by its usage in reference to the act of registering a protest or

complaint, and is thus tinged with the connotation of grievance as well as

powerlessness. For Hortense, who equates marriage with the activity of

homemaking and the possession of a home in which to do it, “lodging,” as either

the domestic space or the activity of occupying it, is beyond inadequate. It is

unacceptable. Viewing Gilbert’s failure to provide a “proper” house as a failing of

his husbandly duties, Hortense in turn refuses to perform wifely duties, and

continues not to have sex with Gilbert. Unlike Leila and Michael’s relationship,

133

Hortense exerts control in their marriage and sets its terms, and the lack of a

proper home informs her decision not to have conjugal relations with her

husband.

Though Hortense does not mention property ownership explicitly in her

vision of her house in England, ownership and control over space are important

aspects of the bourgeois domesticity she seeks. When imagining her idealized

English home, Hortense explicitly envisions conditions of privacy: though she

imagines everyone exchanging polite greetings when circulating in public spaces,

from inside her dream home, she discreetly “look[s] on” (100) her neighbors in

their own homes. For Hortense, as for her imagined English neighbors, domestic

spaces are self-contained and private. The indignity of a lodging house is that it

allows her neither privacy nor jurisdiction over her own space and therefore

prevents the performance of class identity through domesticity. An interaction

with Queenie the day after Hortense arrives reveals Hortense’s frustration with

her lack of control over the space that she inhabits. Queenie comes to the door to

have a chat with Hortense, and a series of miscommunications ensue. When

Queenie asks to have a word with Hortense, Hortense is affronted by the

presumptuousness she exhibits: “I opened the door wider for her before she

thought me impolite. I merely meant for us to talk through a larger opening. But

she walked straight through even though I had not formally invited her in!” (227).

Hortense views herself as the lady of the house, even in a small room, and takes

umbrage at the way Queenie enters the space as though it is hers. Hortense then

observes Queenie “walking the room as if inspecting some task she had asked of

134

me” before noting with approval that Hortense is “tidying up a bit” (ibid.). In

performing her role of landlady, Queenie assumes the right to enter Hortense’s

room and to monitor the way that Hortense is treating the space. Hortense, on the

other hand, views the space as hers, and is silently appalled at Queenie’s lack of

manners, and at the explicitly paternalistic attitude Queenie takes toward Hortense

as a newly arrived black subject. After verbal miscommunications, in which

Queenie cannot understand Hortense’s accent and Hortense cannot understand

Queenie’s idioms, Queenie offers to instruct Hortense in Englishness:

“I’m sure there’s a lot I could teach you, if you wanted.” And then

she sat down on a chair and invited me to come sit with her. But

this was my home, it was for me to tell her when to sit, when to

come in, when to warm her hands. I could surely teach this woman

something, was my thought. Manners! But then I questioned,

Maybe this is how the English do things when they are in England?

So I sat (229).

Hortense bristles at Queenie’s assumption of the right to enter Hortense’s room,

as well as at the suggestion that she needs to be instructed by Queenie. As the

landlady, Queenie uncritically assumes that she has the right to enter any of the

rooms in her house. Queenie’s attitude of assumed superiority and unthinking

condescension manifests itself spatially; her habitation of space is a performance

of ownership that Hortense rejects in favor of her own ideas of the right to inhabit

the room as her home.

135

The conditions in the house, already difficult, intensify when Queenie’s

long-lost husband, Bernard, returns and objects to the presence of black tenants in

the house. When Queenie gives birth to a black baby (the result of her affair with

Hortense’s cousin, Michael Roberts), tensions become even greater, and Gilbert

and Hortense seek out new accommodations. Luckily, Gilbert’s friend and fellow

tenant, Winston, comes to him with the opportunity to buy a house in Finsbury

Park; although Gilbert is intrigued, he is also worried about what Hortense will

think of the house, given her particular standards for living. On the one hand,

Gilbert notes that the house is well-built: “Four floors of solid substantial rooms.

Ceilings so high my voice echoed in them,” and a good-sized garden (501). On

the other hand, he fears Hortense’s judgment of the “crooked” shutters, “gloomy”

rooms, and “nasty smell in the kitchen,” and that “[j]ust waving her white gloves

in the air would see them turn black” (ibid.). Accordingly, he is apprehensive

about showing Hortense the house, and tries to make it look nice for her arrival:

Nervous as a man presenting his sweetheart to his fearsome

mummy – hear this – I had bought a bunch of flowers. The

afternoon before I had placed the winter blooms in a jar on the

mantelpiece […] But now, instead of cheering the place homely,

those flowers looked as woebegone as the room (502).

Levy represents Gilbert showing the house to Hortense as a kind of courtship, in

which Hortense is his mother and the house is his sweetheart, for whom he has

brought flowers. This unexpected redistribution of roles inserts the house into the

marriage narrative in a novel way: the house becomes the prospective bride, while

136

Hortense is her own mother-in-law. The way that the roles of wife and mother are

rearranged emphasizes the fundamental function of the house as the site in which

marital life, as both a social institution and a personal relationship, is performed.

By figuring the house as the bride, and the wife as the mother-in-law, Levy

underscores the importance both of securing a marital home, and of ensuring that

the wife and her family approve of it. As Gilbert’s wife in real life, and his

mother-in-law in the house-as-bride analogy, Hortense’s approval must be won

over in a kind of seduction of affect.

Levy develops the connection between seduction and property ownership

in ways that highlight class as an aspect of desire. Gilbert’s worries about

Hortense seeing the house turn out to be unfounded, and she is eager to move into

their own house and out of Queenie’s. As Gilbert nervously points out the house’s

many flaws to Hortense, she responds that they can be fixed up. When Hortense

expresses her willingness to make the house “nice,” Gilbert is overcome by a

desire to kiss her, which is linked to a desire to see that she lives in the nicest

house possible: “This beautiful woman commanded nothing but the best. Never

again would I think to ask her to settle for just this […] I would make this life

around her good enough to fit that fine apparel” (504). Once Hortense expresses

approval of the house that Gilbert has found, he experiences sexual desire that

leads to a reflection on how Hortense’s beauty and “fine apparel” construct her as

deserving of a certain standard of dwelling. Sexuality is linked to class (and race

and appearance, as the earlier section on pigmentocracy argues) through the site

of the house, such that Hortense’s willingness to live in the house that he has

137

selected triggers a sexual response in Gilbert, which he then channels back into

plans for the kind of house Hortense deserves. Desire for property, sexual desire,

and class propriety converge in the structure of the house.

Levy makes the connection between property and sexuality explicit in the

scene following Hortense’s inspection of the house they are to buy. Since their

marriage, Gilbert has resigned himself to sleeping in the armchair, but tonight,

something different happens:

“Gilbert, you wan’ come into this bed?” […]

Not once did my feet meet with the cold floor before they were

squeezing down between the two sheets […] if the Caribbean sun

had been shining on me […] it could not have felt any more

pleasant […] But I kept myself turned from her, lying rigid as a

stick. Scared if any part of me were to touch her […] she would

start to scream […] I felt her foot press lightly against my leg […]

With her breath fluttering over my ear light as a kiss, she say, “Tell

me, Gilbert, will there be a bell at the door of our new house? And

will the bell go ding-a-ling, ding-a-ling?” While her foot […]

began gently to stroke up and down my leg (505-6).

In a total reversal of the dynamics of seduction operating in the scene in which

Gilbert worried about “introducing” the house to Hortense, Levy represents

Hortense seducing Gilbert now that he has provided her with a house of their

own. But it is not simply that having the house softens Hortense’s attitude toward

Gilbert. Rather, Levy writes the language of property ownership into Hortense’s

138

sexual advances: what we could call “the erotics of property.” Hortense caresses

Gilbert while discussing the house, such that the house itself becomes a form of

foreplay. In this scene, Levy represents the consummation of Gilbert and

Hortense’s marriage through home ownership. Property ownership, rather than

the marriage contract itself, is the necessary foundation for bourgeois domesticity,

and the sexual desire and the desire for real estate are so closely linked they are

conflated.

Where Phillips ends his novel with Leila alone and desolate, wishing to

leave England and move back “home,” Levy ends her novel very differently, with

Hortense and her ready-made family en route to their new life. Gilbert and

Hortense have packed up their room at Queenie’s house; they are taking

Queenie’s baby, at her behest, as they embark on their new domestic family life.

Hortense views the lodging house she is leaving behind without any regret: “No

compunction caused me to look back with longing. No sorrow had me sigh on the

loss of the gas-ring, the cracked sink, or the peeling plaster” (529). Enumerating

the room’s faults simply validates her desire to leave and move into a house that

will do justice to her standards of homemaking – and her new status as a

homeowner. Hortense attempts a final goodbye with Queenie, who, just on the

other side of the door, does not respond. But Hortense can afford to ignore this

rebuff, and she “pull[s] [her] back up and straighten[s] [her] coat against the cold”

(530), forging ahead to what she presumes will be a bright future. Levy

emphasizes the development of emotional fortitude and practicality in Hortense’s

focus on making the best of the circumstances as they are. Unlike Leila, who

139

Phillips represents being in a chronic state of unfulfilled yearning for emotional

contact with others, Levy depicts Hortense’s pragmatic materialism as a

protective, as well as instrumental, mode of being.

Unlike Phillips’ bleak portrayal of failed homemaking and a pronounced

failure of national belonging, Levy’s novel ends on what seems to be a positive

note, as Hortense anticipates her future as a respectable married homeowner.

Within the idealistic – and simplistic – context of millennial multiculturalism,

ending the novel this way might suggest that the black British struggle for

dwelling space and national belonging is over: Hortense has achieved her

domestic goals and we, as readers, can close the book on racism and shelve it as

“history.” It is only if we consciously bring in knowledge of how twentieth

century British history did, in fact, unfold, that this triumphal ending becomes

complicated by the reality of pervasive racism. Levy hints at this eventuality, in

her parting description of Hortense steeling herself against the literal and

metaphoric “cold” as she ventures toward her new home. Though the house

passes Hortense’s white-gloved inspection because she has become pragmatic

enough to ignore a little dirt, we do not see Hortense and Gilbert living in their

new home and interacting with their neighbors as Hortense had once imagined she

would do. Cracked windows and peeling paint can be repaired, as Hortense

assures Gilbert, much to his delight, but a splintered social structure, in which

black Britons are metaphorically unsheltered, cannot be so easily mended and

scrubbed clean. However, uncritical readers will not necessarily choose this

historically-informed reading over the more easily available and comforting

140

reading that concluding the book with marriage, family, and property ownership –

the ingredients of a happy ending – signifies Hortense’s success. It is not a

coincidence that Small Island was filmed as a miniseries (with a tacked-on,

recuperative ending) while The Final Passage was not. Though a more nuanced,

informed reading of Levy’s work dispels some of its superficial portrayal of

progress, the novel’s very focus on history as something that has passed too easily

lulls the uncritical reader into a sense that the stakes of the novel are no longer

relevant – a reading that Phillips’ novel does not allow.

In Small Island and The Final Passage, Levy and Phillips represent the

respective possibility and impossibility of homemaking – within the context of

marriage – as a means of achieving Black British national belonging. Levy and

Phillips both represent marriage as a social and structural contract first and

foremost, one that is informed by pigmentocratic social hierarchies in the

Caribbean and aspires toward a horizon of middleclass domesticity. As I have

argued, the marriage contract, as the foundation of a specifically middleclass form

of domestic dwelling, underwrites national belonging. For Levy, bourgeois

domesticity, underwritten by marriage, is the foundation of Black British national

belonging; for Phillips, middleclass domesticity is an impossible construct,

marriage is a site of violence, and affiliative kinship outside the UK offers an

desired alternative to Black British national belonging in England.

141

Purchasing Propriety: Gentrification and Belonging in Bernardine

Evaristo’s Mr. Loverman and Zadie Smith’s NW

In the final chapter, I turn to Bernardine Evaristo’s Mr. Loverman (2014),

and Zadie Smith’s NW (2012), and to a more recent past animated by concerns

about gentrification and the ongoing commodification of housing under

neoliberalism. Gentrification and commodification, as I argue here, have taken

over the role of the state in perpetuating racialized spatial inequity.

116

In Mr.

Loverman, Evaristo presents the acquisition of property as the assertion of black

British belonging, and the aestheticizing of domestic space as expressions of

neoliberal individuality and subjectivity. Though her novel records the structural

injustice of racism and homophobia obliquely through the inclusion of extended

flashbacks, ultimately, however, Mr. Loverman represents the contemporary

moment as a time in which black, gay, migrant subjects, such as her protagonist,

Barry, can participate fully in the nation through property ownership and the

practice of what could be called “aesthetic domesticity.”

117

Zadie Smith’s more equivocal exploration of property ownership and

neoliberal individualism in NW, by contrast, depicts the often overlooked psychic

costs of gentrification, and the even greater economic and emotional costs borne

by those excluded from gentrifying spaces. While Smith’s Natalie Blake attains

116

See Madden and Marcuse, “Against the Commodification of Housing” for an

overview of the shift from valuing housing for its use value, to valuing housing

economically for its exchange value as a commodity, a development that began

with land enclosure during the industrial era, and which has become pronounced

as a result of the increasing financialization of real estate in recent decades.

117

I use the term “aesthetic domesticity” to name the increasing importance of

attention to particulars of interior decoration, and how those design decisions are

read as the signifying self-expression and social worth of a home’s inhabitants.

142

material and social success through her academic achievement, career, and

marriage, characters such as Felix Cooper and Nathan Bogle are unable to access

the networks of privilege to which Natalie is admitted. Natalie’s success in

achieving “the good life,” promised by the neoliberal rhetoric of self-making, is

emblematized by the acquisition of property. However, such acquisition fails to

produce national belonging, or indeed any kind of belonging. In Smith’s novel,

unlike Evaristo’s, the idea of national belonging appears not to be the primary

focus, largely because most of her characters were born in the United Kingdom

and appear to take their Britishness for granted.

118

Nonetheless, issues of

community and of belonging are central to the novel and Smith represents private

property, and privatization generally, as fundamentally isolating. For Smith,

private property operates against the idea of social collectivity, even if the

questions of citizenship and national belonging are less prominent.

My argument here is that Benardine Evaristo’s Mr. Loverman and Zadie

Smith’s NW articulate two different views of the relationship between property

ownership and the nation, and that these differences reveal a critically important

disparity between the belief that individual success is a product and sign of

widespread social progress, and the alternative view that collective goals rather

than individual gains are the meaningful aims of a just society. It is my contention

that Evaristo endorses the conservative, neoliberal idea that national belonging is

118

The exception here is Michel, Leah Hanwell’s husband, who has migrated to

the UK; although Leah is one of the three protagonists of NW, I do not focus on

her in this chapter, as she is white, and my concern here is with black Britishness.

143

predicated on property ownership.

119

Evaristo portrays Barry overcoming the

difficulties he faces as a black, closeted gay man by acquiring property, thus

enabling his financial and social success. Though the narrative does not unfold

chronologically, nonetheless, the trajectory of the plot charts Barry’s move toward

greater material gain and personal self-empowerment. Smith, by contrast, writes

against neoliberalism’s rhetoric of individual material success as a mark of social

worth. Instead of representing property ownership as a metaphor for national

belonging, NW is more interested in exploring the effects of private property on

individuals: ownership causes individuals to turn inward and away from collective

public life. For Smith, the result is anomie and dissatisfaction, especially when

subjects, such as Natalie, achieve the goals that neoliberalism puts on offer. As I

show, while individual achievement produces inclusion within the nation in

Evaristo’s novel, Smith’s novel illustrates how the commodification of property

isolates subjects and inhibits national belonging – or, indeed, collective belonging

of any kind. Evaristo’s novel, as I argue, champions neoliberalism as the engine

for undoing biases of race, class, and sexual orientation through the magic of

financial success, while Smith exposes the myths of meritocracy and individual

success, revealing the barriers that still prevent many from achieving material

success. Furthermore, for Smith, success appears to be hollow even when it is

achieved.

119

See Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism, or Steger and Roy’s

Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction for an even briefer account of

neoliberalism’s ascendance from its origins in mid-twentieth century ideology to

late twentieth and early twenty-first century policy.

144

Under the imperative of what I am calling neoliberal self-making – that is,

the compulsion to create a socially-valuable individual self within a society that

denies the persistence of structural conditions such as class – the mere practice of

homemaking does not ensure national belonging: to be a real citizen under

neoliberalism means not only to be a middle-class consumer, but to own real

estate. The idea of neoliberal self-making draws on Wendy Brown’s important

theoretical contribution to understanding homo economicus as “financialized

human capital” (Brown, 33), engaged in the perpetual work of “enhancing the

self’s future value” as “both a member of a firm and […] itself a firm” (34).

120

Self-making also refers to the survival strategies that individuals are forced to

employ in the current moment, when neoliberalism’s extension of economic

values to all aspects of life has altered the way that individuals view themselves in

relation to others.

121

Thus, as Brown and others have observed, neoliberal self-

making makes the borders between selves and products porous: the self is a

commodity being marketed, but the individual’s proximity to products and the

ability to consume them in turn reflects back on the self’s worth. In the context of

the two novels under consideration, buying property – or the property itself –

becomes the ground upon which self-worth and belonging is assessed. As the

most significant commodity individuals typically buy, houses increasingly have

120

Brown’s Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, discussed in

my introduction, is the crucial resource for thinking about how neoliberal

ideology has seeped into daily life.

121

See also McGee’s theorization of the work invested in the “belabored self”

(17) in Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life; Salecl’s formulation

of the corporatized individual – “Me, Inc.” (164) – in “Society of Choice”; and

McGuigan’s Neoliberal Culture, ch. 6, “Investing in the Self,” and ch. 7,

“Neoliberal Selfhood.”

145

become crucial to communicating an individual’s social value. This ideal of the

citizen-homeowner, it should be noted, is not simply individual ideology; rather,

this ideal is endorsed and promoted in government policies that see

homeownership as the solution to poverty and deprivation.

122

Thus, the state itself

is engaged in promoting gentrification and middleclass property ownership as

forms of national belonging and individual empowerment.

123

Ostensibly, gentrification opens up property ownership, and the social

goods it is thought to entail, to anyone regardless of race, gender, or class

background; in practice, it valorizes white, middleclass subjects at the expense of

people of color, women, and the working class.

124

As Ruth Glass, who had coined

the term “gentrification” had rightly observed, the process was one in which

working-class neighborhoods were “invaded by the middle classes” (qtd. in

Curran, 12). However, under Blair and his successors, this “invasion” of working-

class areas was reframed as urban renewal and promoted as a solution to poverty:

the presence of middleclass homeowners, which, it was assumed, would uplift the

poor, in fact obscured the continued poverty of working-class residents, who did

122

See Davidson, “The Impossibility of Gentrification and Social Mixing,” on the

failures of pro-gentrification government policy in the UK that presumes so-called

“social upgrading” (233, qts. orig.) can alleviate poverty; as Davidson shows, the

introduction of middleclass residents into impoverished areas does nothing to help

the poor, but merely obscures poverty by making it appear less concentrated.

123

Ruth Glass first coined the term “gentrification” in 1964 to describe

middleclass residents taking over formerly working-class urban neighborhoods,

which led to a rise in property values; see Curran, 12.

124

See Curran, Gender and Gentrification, on the ways that gentrification, and

housing policy more broadly, caters to middleclass heteropatriarchal families,

while failing to address the needs of women, single-parents, people of color, and

queer, elderly, disabled, and poor people.

146

not benefit from “improvements” that failed to address their own needs.

125

Rather

than framing housing as a social issue impacted by structural racism and

economic inequity, the “problem” of poverty – and, though less overtly than in

previous decades, of race – was viewed as somehow endemic to particular areas,

and poor and black individuals were themselves framed as the source of

deprivation.

These social “problems,” neoliberal, New Labour thinking goes, could be

solved by attracting middleclass and/or white residents to deprived areas. Though

New Labour’s discourse of multicultural tolerance professed the ideal of diversity

(when “diversity” meant the commodification of “ethnic” cultures within a

capitalist framework), the white middleclasses were still positioned as the

consumers of multiculturalism and the subjects who practice tolerance, thus

othering people of color.

126

Furthermore, the dominance of private property in the

housing market, combined with the persistence of racism – despite individual

success stories and the rhetoric of multicultural tolerance – inform the

demonstrated correlations between class, race, and spatial disadvantage.

127

Finally, the gendered ideology of home also persists, even as property is

125

See Davidson, “The Impossibility of Gentrification and Social Mixing.”

126

See Byrne, “In Search of a ‘Good Mix,’” and Jackson, “The Pigeon and the

Weave” for sociological studies of how this dynamic shapes (primarily white,

middleclass) subjects’ perception of “multicultural” neighborhoods as alternately

desirable and/or dangerous; see Sara Ahmed’s Strange Encounters, as well as ch.

6 of The Cultural Politics of Emotion for theoretical discussions of how the

multiculturalism recenters white subjects as those who enact its “imperative to

love difference” (Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 133).

127

See Karn and Phillips on the need to redress the “neglect of Britain’s

deepening social, economic, and spatial inequalities, which are indissolubly

intertwined with racial inequalities” (153).

147

commodified: while men are positioned as property owners extracting wealth

from their possession of space, women are still identified with the home as a

proxy for their own personal morality, achieved through the patriarchal institution

of marriage.

“A Nation of Inheritors”: Neoliberal Housing Policy under Thatcher and Blair

Evaristo’s and Smith’s novels are set during a period in British history

when gentrification has greatly altered housing availability in London. In the

1980s, Thatcher and Thatcherism radically changed housing in Britain from a

welfare state model of social provision to a market-based private property model

with the implementation of the Housing Act of 1980, commonly referred to as the

“Right to Buy” (RTB) program.

128

This was a crucial part of Thatcher’s

privatization of formerly public utilities. Though Prime Ministers Margaret

Thatcher and Tony Blair might on the surface seem to be on opposite sides of the

ideological divide, New Labour’s neoliberal embrace of market solutions had

much in common with Thatcherism. Right to Buy was an explicit attack on

postwar socialist values that had led to the construction of public housing; indeed

RTB was expressly designed to increase home ownership by selling council

homes to tenants at a reduced rate and to shrink the number of tenants in public

housing. The intent was to create “a nation of inheritors” (qtd. in Halliday, 13),

129

128

Steger and Roy, Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction, p. 41; Malpass,

Housing and the Welfare State: the Development of Housing Policy in Britain, ch.

129

See Halliday, The Inheritance of Wealth: Justice, Equality, and the Right to

Bequeath.

148

befitting the conservative ideal of home ownership as firmly rooted in individual

possession and marital and familial relationships: self-sufficiency, rather than

reliance on state services, makes families, rather than “society” responsible for

housing.

In actual fact, rather than enabling the freedom of choice its architects

propounded, neoliberal housing policy has worsened economic inequality and has

demonized as social pariahs those unable to capitalize on RTB. An “engine of

inequality” that “rewarded the people who are generally better off in the first

place” (Malpass, 158),

130

RTB positioned the poor as “flawed consumer[s]”

(Bauman, 1), and, thus, within neoliberalism’s ideology of privatized

consumption, less than full citizens.

131

Under neoliberalism, purchasing power

determines social worth and belonging, and “buying a house is the biggest item of

expenditure that anyone can make,” leading some scholars of housing policy to

conclude that homeownership is “the clearest demonstration of citizenship”

(Malpass, 168). Housing policy thus makes manifest neoliberalism’s

transmutation of national belonging achieved through political engagement and

citizenship into belonging via consumption. No one made the link between

purchasing power and national belonging clearer than Thatcher. A staunch

opponent of socialism who famously denied the existence of such a thing as

“society,” claiming that “[t]here are only individual men and women… and their

families” (qtd. in Brown, 100), she subsequently asserted that “[t]here is no such

130

See Malpass, Housing and the Welfare State: the Development of Housing

Policy in Britain.

131

See Bauman, Work, Consumerism and the New Poor.

149

thing as public money; there is only taxpayers’ money.”

132

Collective belonging

and the principle that each citizen has equal standing in society, thus, gives way to

the notion that individuals are valued unequally, according to their financial

resources. Neoliberal housing policy has thus enjoyed bipartisan acceptance in the

UK for the past three decades. The foundational tension between seeing housing

as a lifelong right, and seeing it as a stopgap measure en route to homeownership,

has been resolved favor of ownership, at the expense of those unable to purchase

property.

133

The notion that citizens have a right to social benefits has been

replaced with the moralizing language of “accountability” and “respectability”

(Steger and Roy, 71).

Neoliberal Self-Making in the “Society of Choice”

134

In neoliberal Britain (the setting of both Smith’s and Evaristo’s novels),

those unable to purchase property are seen as “deficient citizens” (Bauman, 50).

Economic metrics have become the dominant mode of discourse, overshadowing

humanist ideals about the inherent value of human life. Individuals are compelled

to produce themselves as what Beverley Skeggs calls “subject[s] of value”

(Skeggs, 6, qts. orig.) in order to assert their social worth.

135

132

See www.margaretthatcher.org/document/105454, accessed 11 Nov. 2019.

133

See Hanley, Estates: An Intimate History, ch. 2, “The End of the Slums: the

Rise of the Council Estates” for a discussion of the development of social housing

in the wake of the First and Second World Wars.

134

See Salecl’s “Society of Choice” for a discussion of the imperative of

consumer choice in structuring contemporary society.

135

Skeggs, Class, Self, Culture.

150

The incorporation of discourses of national belonging into neoliberal

metrics of economic value as the sign of moral worth produced the middleclass

citizen-homeowner as the good subject. It is this definition of good subjects that

we find in Evaristo and Smith. Property ownership becomes the necessary

grounds for legitimate homemaking. Evaristo’s Barry and Smith’s Natalie both

become property owners and thus fulfill a key requirement for neoliberal subjects.

However, the way that Evaristo and Smith represent these acquisitions differs

dramatically. For Barry, property ownership becomes not only a means of

articulating neoliberal subjecthood, but is also a means of self-expression; Barry’s

acquisition of property declares his self-sufficiency and therefore separation from

the welfare state. His penchant for décor becomes an expression of his

individuality: consumption, and the judicious choices of the right kind of objects,

enable him to become a proper neoliberal subject in twenty-first century Britain.

Evaristo’s novel thus appears to endorse the idea of neoliberal self-making as both

empowering and possible. Smith, on the other hand, writes property ownership as

a hollow display of status that produces alienation. Natalie does everything right

to become a neoliberal subject of value, but the end result is not the discovery or

expression of her “true self” through material things, but rather a sense of

continual performance of a role that she does not even want. Smith’s novel

reveals private property ownership as a false sense of belonging; for Smith, the

privatization of property is a way of sealing oneself off from real life.

151

“The Kingdom of Barrington” (112): Owning Property, Performing Neoliberal

National Belonging in Evaristo’s Mr. Loverman

Bernardine Evaristo, the recent co-recipient of the Booker Prize, has been

an important figure in black British literature for the past two decades.

136

Her

novels include Lara (1997, rev. ed. 2009); The Emperor’s Babe (2001); Soul

Tourists (2005); Blonde Roots (2008); Hello Mum (2010); Mr. Loverman (2014);

and the Booker Prize -winning Girl, Woman, Other (2019). A prolific writer, she

has also published poetry, numerous articles and reviews, and has written pieces

for television and radio, thus maintaining a visible public presence both in

academia and popular culture. By the time her 2014 novel Mr. Loverman was

published, Evaristo was already an established author who had attained popular

and critical acclaim. The novel won two literary prizes and was named a book of

the year by the Observer. Reviewers of the novel were entirely complimentary,

terming it a “most engaging and rewarding read”

137

; “funny and touching”

138

; a

“vibrant novel” that portrays “complex individuals as well as the West Indian

immigrant culture in Britain”

139

; a “bold, assured novel [that] briskly disposes of

ideas about victimhood,” presenting instead a “riproaring, full-bodied riff on sex,

secrecy and family.”

140

Even those who critiqued the novel’s “occasional

passages in which the prose feels forced”

141

and “stilted minor characters”

142

did

136

See Evaristo’s author page for a compilation of her accomplishments, far too

numerous to list here: bevaristo.com/, accessed 8 Dec. 2019.

137

Price and Price.

138

Jordison.

139

Bush.

140

Gee.

141

Washington.

152

so in the context of otherwise admiring commentary on its “sharp dialogue, comic

set pieces and wry observations” and the “intimate portrait of love, sexuality,

ageing and family.”

143

My attention, however, will be on how Barry’s relation to property shapes

his sense of belonging in Britain. In particular, I focus on Evaristo’s depiction of

property ownership as liberation: Barry’s wealth as a real estate holder is what

enables him to express his gay identity, and to inhabit the city – and then the

country – freely. By representing property ownership as personal empowerment.

Evaristo endorses the rhetoric of neoliberal self-making and makes the

commodification and aestheticization of homemaking read as progress.

Mr. Loverman’s protagonist, Barrington Jedidiah Walker, aka Barry, is an

aging Antiguan lothario who has lived in London for the past fifty years. At the

novel’s opening, Barry, now 74, increasingly feels compelled to live openly with

his male lover, Morris, rather than maintain the secrecy of their decades-long

relationship. Alienated from his wife, Carmel, who, he assumes, thinks that he

sleeps around with other women, and at odds with his daughters, Barry wants to

spend the rest of his life with Morris, but fears the social censure and domestic

upheaval such a disclosure would entail. In addition, though Barry wants to live

more freely, the bourgeois life of comfort that his marriage makes possible is hard

to give up. Crucially, it is Barry’s suppression of his sexuality and his

performance of heteronormative domesticity that give him the idea, and the

means, to purchase property: his inability to publically express his feelings for

142

Field.

143

Ibid.

153

Morris prompts him to purchase property, although it is his marriage to Carmel

that gives him the capital (via Carmel’s father) to do so. When Barry’s secret

sexual life is finally revealed, he and Carmel part ways. But rather than undoing

his life, as Barry has feared, the exposure allows him to enjoy living openly with

Morris for the first time. Carmel, on the other hand, uses the alimony to return to

Antigua and open a resort; while her narrative, too, reinforces the connection

between entrepreneurialism and personal empowerment, it is worth noting that

this alignment of self and success is not contained in the UK, but pervades the

Caribbean islands as well. By framing Barry’s narrative this way, Evaristo

illustrates how marriage and middleclass respectability continue to shape

domesticity in the era of neoliberal individualism. Evaristo’s novel thus explores

the tension between what Barry refers to as “Comfort” – heteronormative

domesticity – and “Conflict” – openness about his sexuality (176), ultimately

illustrating how financial success enables Barry, and Carmel, to break free of the

confines of marital homemaking and pursue their individual, entrepreneurial self-

making projects. Barry’s sexual freedom comes at the price of being able to pay,

literally, for his release from heteronormative domesticity, and it is this

connection between personal liberation and finances that leads me to characterize

the novel as neoliberal: Barry is able to buy a happy ending, even if it has come at

great psychic cost.

Though Barry’s marriage is personally stifling, it is also the root of his

property ownership and future wealth. Not only does marriage provide the reason

for buying a house, to adapt Wigley’s phrase, it is the marital connection that

154

makes accessible the finances to do so. Barry begins to build his real estate

empire by borrowing money from his father-in-law. This requires “cajol[ing],

brainwashing” and otherwise convincing his wife, Carmel, to ask her father to

“advance [him] the working capital (Evaristo, 114). Carmel’s father, a grocer

owner currently “expanding his Early Bird Empire” (ibid.) of stores, eventually

heeds his daughter’s request, and Barry gets the money. Instead of the

sentimentalized version of marriage – in place since at least the nineteenth century

– as an affective bond between spouses, Barry’s manipulation of marriage for

financial gain hearkens back to the preindustrial understanding of matrimony as

financial arrangement between families.

144

Denied a loan from the bank due to

racist lending practices, Barry relies upon the institution of marriage to provide

capital. Although Barry resents having to stoop to tactics such as “cajolement,”

only to be charged high interest on the loan by his father-in-law, he has no other

option. The fact that Carmel’s father is a member of the bourgeoisie, profiting

from his “Empire” of grocery stores, makes Barry’s own property “empire”

possible. The way that Barry refers to this transaction is significant: in stating that

his father-in-law “advance[s him] the working capital,” Barry positions himself as

an investor in the housing market. Barry’s primary concern is profiting from real

estate, rather than providing a home for his family, a stark contrast to Adella’s

quest for survival in Waiting in the Twilight. Similarly, Leila and Hortense’s

attempts to assert middleclass marital respectability are far removed from Barry’s

concerns. Like Selvon’s Moses, who is “on the lookout for an investment”

144

See Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural

Contradictions of Capitalism.

155

(Selvon, 1), Barry, too, strives to own property. The reasons behind their

respective failure or success – Moses’ lack of access to family finances; the

timing of their purchases – are less relevant here than how that success or failure

is represented in the novels. In some ways, Moses might seem to be an early

proponent of the kind the ideology that drives neoliberal self-making. However,

Selvon’s representation of Moses’ obsession with signifiers of traditional English

literary culture and public monuments, and his desire to inhabit the role of the

racist landlord, shows that Moses is invested in conservative forms of social

relations, and simply wishes to have access to the positions of power within them

– a desire that Selvon lampoons throughout the novel, and reveals such ambitions

to be impossible to achieve for certain groups of immigrants. Barry’s narrative is

different in that he does not purchase property in order to “become a landlord” for

the social capital that status provides. Rather, Barry goes into real estate for the

money; the status he acquires is secondary. It is this difference in their respective

motivations that makes Evaristo’s novel one of neoliberal self-making, while

Selvon’s novel satirizes structural racism. In terms of status, Barry does, however,

one-up Moses at his own game: rather than merely inhabiting a “castle” (Selvon,

11), as Moses prides himself on doing, Barry dubs his profitable real estate

holdings the “Kingdom of Barrington” (Evaristo, 112), adding his own imagined

principality to the national imaginary of the United Kingdom.

Though he often chafes at the constraints that heteronormative marital and

familial ties place on him, it is Barry’s embeddedness in – and explicit

exploitation of – these social structures that enables him to purchase the property

156

in the first place. Barry’s description of convincing Carmel to ask her father for

the loan emphasizes his initiative and shrewd business instincts in developing and

executing what proves to be a successful moneymaking scheme. Rather than

focusing on his lack of funds and dependence on marital relationships to get the

money, Barry, in his characteristic breezy, self-confident tone, highlights his

persuasive skills and his power over Carmel. As Evaristo’s novel makes clear,

family and marriage largely determine one’s ability to access sufficient initial

capital to make investments. What is revealed, despite Barry’s narrative of self-

making, is precisely the truth, denied by neoliberalism, that family wealth, rather

than individual effort, is what enables further wealth accumulation.

Although Barry’s voice, and the novel’s plot, reinforce the belief that

individual acts of self-making and the rehabilitation of pre-existing social

structures represents “progress,” the novel also represents how familial and

political institutions continue to regulate access to wealth. In particular, the legacy

of empire interweaves the financial with the political. The specter of empire that

emerges and is then quickly brushed past in the context of Carmel’s father’s

Empire grocery stores is already present in Barry’s initial idea to purchase the

property. When Barry gets the idea to invest in property, he speaks of it in the

context of the history of empire:

At some point I found myself paying proper attention for the first

time to the three slummified Victorian houses on the walk opposite

our spot. Vandalized windows, wrecked roofs, gardens being

reclaimed by the forests of Ye Olde England. I said to Morris,

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“Look how huge they is, spar. Once upon a time, they must-a been

built for the rich, and, you mark my words, one day the rich shall

recolonize them. I, Barrington Jedidiah Walker, hereby predict the

gentrification of Stoke Newington.” (Evaristo, 113).

Speaking to his lover, Morris, as they lounge in the park, Barry is not only

extraordinarily prescient in his evaluation of the future desirability of the then-

depressed properties he surveys, he describes the return of the rich as an act of

recolonization. Anticipating gentrification, Barry positions the mobility of the

wealthy as a form of colonization – which, in effect, it is – and one on which he is

keen to capitalize. He is smart to do so, given that “[t]he home ownership market

in Britain has functioned as a massive, though far from random, lottery,

distributing differential gains and losses to millions of owners across the country

and over time” (Hamnett, 10-1), one in which “date of purchase is the most

important determinant of absolute gains” (100).

145

Barry’s foresight enables him

to get in on the ground floor of the late-twentieth century housing boom.

Although London, like other British cities, went through a rough patch,

economically, in the 1970s and 1980s, its resurgence in the twenty-first century

dramatically increased housing prices, benefitting those who had purchased

property prior to the boom. Evaristo’s description of this dynamic in terms of

colonization reveals the imbalance of power that governs the current housing

market. Though Barry buys his properties for their exchange value as “investment

145

See Hamnett, Winners and Losers: Home Ownership in Modern Britain.

158

vehicles,”

146

most people purchase houses for their use value, as places to live, but

they are increasingly priced out. The inability to buy a home in London also

means being priced out of access to the amenities and opportunities that desirable

locations, such as London, offer. This spatial division resembles the British

imperial enterprise, in that it differentiates between spaces of resource extraction

(the colonies) and wealth accumulation (the metropole). While these historical

spatial divisions continue to obtain, making the former Caribbean colonies a

resource for leisure via the tourism industry,

147

the class divisions within

countries, and cities, demonstrate that housing prices are contributing to increased

social inequity in the UK (as elsewhere).

148

As Barry astutely notes in envisioning

future reurbanization as recolonization, the rich continue to take the best spaces

for themselves: in the past, this meant benefitting directly from resource

extraction; now, it means occupying urban spaces with access to amenities and

opportunities for highly paid work, or purchasing properties as investments and

profiting from them, as Barry does. This produces what Marx called a rentier

society, under which inequality intensifies, as the wealthiest, extracting exchange

value from real estate, make accessing the use value of housing increasingly

difficult for the majority of the population.

149

146

See Hamnett, 2; and more generally on changes in the British home ownership

market from 1960-99.

147

See Jamaica Kincaid’s cutting and insightful A Small Place for a critique

against the tourism industry in the Caribbean.

148

See Florida, The New Urban Crisis.

149

See Mazzucato, The Value of Everything, for a critique of contemporary rentier

society.

159

Evaristo’s novel does not attend, however, to the collateral damage, in the

form of increasing economic inequity, which results from the same real estate

market intensification that allows Barry to develop his property empire. Though

Barry openly acknowledges that he is the rare “exception” (113) to racist

structures that foreclose the futures of black British men, his exceptional success

is centered in the novel, and the deprivation faced by minor characters is

mentioned only in passing. Instead, the novel focuses on Barry and his family

inhabiting property and redecorating it as if these acts of personal expression

constituted significant social progress. Two properties are described as

undergoing changes in ownership and style in the novel: the flat Barry shares with

his wife, Carmel, and the apartment in a converted spice warehouse that belongs

first to his white ex-lover, Stephen, and which Barry later buys for his daughter,

Maxine. The converted warehouse apartment is explicitly marked by the history

of British imperialism. When Barry visits Stephen’s remodeled flat in the spice

warehouse, he observes the “same hoists […] that used to haul up barrels of

cinnamon and turmeric, saffron and cumin—when the spoils of Empire flowed

upriver,” and a “Chinese emperor’s brass bed.” (Evaristo, 179). Though the

apartment has been renovated, it still retains traces of history: its past connection

to British imperial history of commodity exchanges and the amassing of wealth

through colonial resource extraction. Though now no longer a site of production,

the flat has itself become a commodity, the purchase of which allows its wealthy

white owner to profit off the space itself, rather than the industries it once housed.

Keeping signifiers of British imperial dominance both indicates a reluctance to let

160

go of the imperial past, and the refusal to acknowledge the actual history of

exploitation. Behind Stephen’s aesthetic choices, and his “foppish blond fringe

and rah-rah vowels” is a class privilege derived in part from imperial wealth

(ibid.). Signifiers of the history of classed imperial power themselves have been

refurbished; they are now elements of chic décor to be consumed by

knowledgeable neoliberal subjects. Stephen’s display of classed and imperial

privilege informs the masculine aesthetic of the apartment as a whole, which

impresses Barry profoundly. It provides him with a vision of “the possibility of a

lifestyle for real men: wood and metal, leather and brick” (ibid, ital. orig.). In an

odd inversion of history, the relics of empire read, in this scene, as an assertion of

class and of gendered knowledge of what constitutes “good taste,” the objects in

his domestic space functioning as a statement about what makes Stephen an

object of desire for Barry.

Fetishizing imperial signifiers is one way to assert class power, while

erasing them is another. When he makes money as a real estate magnate, Barry

buys Stephen’s flat and gives it to his daughter, Maxine, who “paint[s] the brick

walls white, the concrete floor yellow, put[s] a futon in one corner, […] and

turn[s] the last corner of her room into her “studio”– cluttered up with easels, oils,

fabrics, and other signs of artistic intent” (180). Unlike Stephen, who fetishizes

the imperial past, Maxine asserts her ownership by painting right over it. Maxine,

a member of the so-called “creative class” (Florida), makes her living, such as it

is, in the art world, and her lifestyle is an extension of her work. She is practically

indistinguishable from “those posh interns out there, backed to the hilt by their

161

parents” (Evaristo, 180), as Barry exclaims in frustration. While Maxine is

proffered as a sign of social change, the fact that any particular black woman now

can occupy such a privileged social position hardly changes the circumstance of

class privilege; it merely redraws the boundaries slightly. Maxine’s ability to

override the history of empire through her redesign of the flat both testifies to the

importance of communicating her individual aesthetic through the arrangement of

her living space, and also distances herself from imperial history by disregarding

traces of its legacy. Stephen transforms relics of imperial history into aesthetic

props that highlight their superficial qualities while deflecting responsibility for

their origins; Maxine glosses over imperial history entirely, masking even the

surface remnants of empire in paint that proclaims her personality and

contemporaneity, and her dominance over the space in which she lives. These are

two different versions of incorporating – by obscuring –history in the present

through inhabiting space and re-presenting objects in the material world. The

history of the spice warehouse remains, but it is no longer present in the same

way, as the focus on personal style overtakes the question of how wealth

acquisition and distribution makes such styles possible.

Décor, in the novel, charts how subjects of value are constituted. When

Carmel leaves, Barry remodels his flat and uses home décor to assert his unique

sense of style as someone who knows how to consume in privileged ways. One of

the ways he does this is by disparaging his wife’s interior design. Characterizing

Carmel’s décor choices as typifying a “Madame Arriviste back in the ‘60’s,”

Barry positions himself as a design critic:

162

Could write a cultural studies essay about that particular

phenomenon: Coming from sparsely furnished homes, the women

of the West Indies went goggle-eyed at the veritable cornucopia of

colorful fripperies on sale in the Land of Hope and Affordable

Ornaments. Easy (177; ital. orig.).

By critiquing his wife’s choices, Barry both emphasizes his distinctiveness from

her and from their marital home, and in doing so, claims the position of cultural

arbiter for himself. By referencing Socrates and Dalí, Barry positions himself as

the cosmopolitan, urbane subject in sharp distinction to Carmel, whose ariviste

penchant for “colorful fripperies” he derides as “kitsch,” so unlike the “harmony”

of his own design choices (178). It is interesting to note that Evaristo’s description

of Carmel’s interior decoration reflects actual features of Caribbean migrants’

homes in Britain

150

– the very elements that Barry describes and critiques, and

which can be summed up as maximalist, as Barry’s satirization implies. After

taking an art history class and learning the idiom of middleclass British

consumption, Barry feels justified in pronouncing “Wifey is the Goddess of Bad

Taste” (Evaristo, 178). His judgment positions Carmel as a naïve folk culture

practitioner, the object of study rather than the consuming subject, and allows

Barry to occupy the position of (imperial) surveyor asserting his own mastery of

cultural signifiers through his reading of domestic aesthetics.

When Barry’s relationship with Morris is revealed, spurring his divorce

from Carmel, Barry declares his independence by interior remodeling, which, he

150

See McMillan, The Front Room: Migrant Aesthetics in the Home.

163

imagines, will thereby “obliterate all traces of [his] former life, wife, and strife”

(273). Barry seems determined to adopt the signifiers of empire and make them

his own, in the form of “plantation-style furniture” and “a (parlor-palmed)

conservatory”; Evaristo’s added emphasis to the phrase “master bedroom”

amplifies the imperial connotations of Barry’s choice of furnishing (179). Barry’s

idea of personal freedom, one in which he can live openly with Morris, is,

paradoxically, expressed through the appropriation of signifiers of imperialism

and histories of unfreedom. Although Barry is imbricated within such histories,

her seems eager to occupy the role of the “master.” This presumed class

ascendancy, aided by financial success, is communicated through stylistic choices

that reflect power.

Evaristo’s novel repeatedly articulates a neoliberal view; in particular, the

novel seems to endorse the idea of social change as something that can be

achieved through consumption and performance, rather than as a good for which

society – and individuals – struggle. No doubt, Barry’s property empire is a way

for him to assert power in a society that deprivileges him; the need for the

“empire” springs from his sense of powerlessness and inability to express his

sexuality freely. Indeed, Barry gets the idea to build his property empire precisely

because he is not allowed to express his sexual identity openly. While he and

Morris are in a public park, surrounded by heterosexual couples engaged in

“extreme canoodling and groping on the grass—blatantly, unashamedly, legally”

(Evaristo, 113), conduct that is not available to him and Morris, Barry decides to

buy property. He is, therefore, purchasing privacy in order to avoid exposure and

164

public censure of his sexuality. Barry’s desire to ensure privacy – and, more

importantly, safety – is understandable in light of the violent history of

homophobia. While witnessing out gay couples in the contemporary twenty-first

century is a surprising and welcome phenomenon to him, Barry retains a mental

map of locations of incidents of violence against queer men, which continue to

haunt him. On his way to meet Morris at a café for lunch, Barry passes a spot

where a Jamaican man was beaten to death for his sexual relationship with

another man, recalling, “Even today I still get flashbacks to what happened one

Sunday morning in the early hours” (111). These earlier lessons about who can

safely traverse the city have stayed with Barry, contributing to his amazement at

the newly public gay culture that he begins to experience. Amidst the gay culture

of Old Compton Street unfolding in “blatant, flirtational, public view,” Barry feels

a sense of belonging and being recognized in the truth of his sexuality that he had

not previously experienced: “Ain’t no fakery here. Lord, they know us” (231).

Valorizing privacy, rather than ensuring that all individuals can occupy

public space safely, without censure or reprisal, is, as some queer thinkers and

activists have argued, inherently conservative; as Melinda Chateauvert notes,

“Moral respectability is embedded in liberal citizenship; even the demand for

sexual privacy is a housebound concept that reinforces class differences by

assuming that people have access to private space (Chateauvert, 13).”

151

It should

also be noted that the public openness of the present day gay culture that Barry

witnesses is not exactly “public” in the same way as the heterosexual make-out

151

See Chateauvert, Melinda. Sex Workers Unite: a History of the Movement from

Stonewall to Slutwalk.

165

scene in the park. Instead of embracing openly in the public space of the park,

Barry and Morris join the younger gay cohort as patrons of “the oldest gay pub in

London” (Evaristo, 233). Despite its name, the pub is not a truly public

establishment; rather, it occupies a middle ground between communal spaces and

the citadels of individual ownership. Whereas the couples making out in the park

were exercising their “right to the city” by occupying public space freely as

citizens, the patrons of the pub are present as consumers.

152

Unlike residential,

domestic spaces, anyone can theoretically walk into the pub without invitation,

but unlike the park, there is a price to pay for remaining in that space. Evaristo

thus literalizes the price of belonging in London by writing Barry’s entrance into

public gay life in terms of purchase and consumption, rather than habitation and

performance.

Evaristo’s novel clearly illustrates how property ownership underwrites

the occupation of public space. When Barry walks through the city, he does so

explicitly as a property owner, an identity that modulates perceptions of his gay or

black identities and allows him access to public spaces from which in the past he

might have been barred. But even before he comes out, Barry insists on walking

through the city, despite his knowledge of its possible dangers, proclaiming, “So

long as my legs can walk, I go walk” (112). This declaration of his right to occupy

the city segues into a discussion of his real estate empire, as he passes “Queen

152

See Marcuse, “From Critical Urban Theory to the Right to the City” and

Harvey, “The Right to the City” for scholarly accounts of Henri Lefebrve’s

formulation of this foundational spatial justice concept, as well as the activist

network Right to the City’s website, righttothecity.org/,

accessed 9 Dec. 2019, an example of how this concept informs activist practice.

166

Elizabeth’s Walk, wherein reside [his] first three rental properties” (ibid.).

Moving from the lingering memory of the violence in the streets against gay men

into an account of his property holdings and how he came to acquire them, Barry

asserts his right to occupy the city through his declaration of ownership.

Moreover, Evaristo intensifies this sense of ownership through the specific

location of Queen Elizabeth’s Walk as the site of Barry’s properties: as he strolls

down Queen Elizabeth’s Walk, Barry is, in a sense, inhabiting a queenly role, in

both the regal and queer senses of the word, by walking in Queen Elizabeth’s

footsteps. The security offered by his real estate holdings give him the confidence

to occupy the city, despite being haunted by homophobic violence, as he can point

to buildings and assert ownership of them. For Evaristo, aesthetic choices and

self-expression are presented as national belonging in the neoliberal world of her

novel, where purchasing power determines social worth: subjects can only be “at

home” if they can afford to buy one.

Evaristo ends her novel about homemaking with a road trip, which,

paradoxically, confirms her protagonist’s newfound domestic security. In

addition to renovating his flat, Barry overhauls his Buick; Evaristo devotes almost

as much space to the redo of the car as she does to the remodeling of the flat,

suggesting that these two possessions are equally important. Barry and Morris

take a road trip in the freshly redone car, the first scene in the book that shows

them venturing outside London. The trip prompts Barry to contemplate his

relation to several places that he has called home. Driving through the countryside

167

heightens Barry’s awareness of London’s place in England, and his own relation

to each of these locations:

It’s only when you drive out of London that you get the sense that

most of this land is made up of countryside […] I been a citizen of

the concrete jungle too long […] Years ago we was even less

welcome in the countryside than in the towns. It was safer to stay

within the walls of the citadel […] All-a this space and sky and

greenery is like being in another country altogether […] I starting

to feel like a tourist, like we somewhere foreign, somewhere

abroad (282).

Barry reflects on the fact that racism in the countryside was even worse than that

in urban areas like London, a fact that has kept him from venturing outside the

relative protection that the city – simultaneously both a “jungle,” suggesting

untamed wilderness, and a “citadel,” suggesting military fortification – affords

black subjects.

153

But Barry also notes that most of the country is country;

London’s concrete is an exception, rather than the norm. Despite his long

residence in England, Barry feels he has not really lived in England, as he

envisions it, at all; he has been a citizen of London, and the rest of the country is

foreign to him. At the novel’s end, Evaristo depicts Barry as newly secure enough

in his belonging in London to begin venturing out into the rural parts of England

where he formerly would have felt unwelcome. During the drive, Barry also

contemplates a trip to the Caribbean: “I been thinking how maybe it’s time to go

153

See Joanna Johnson’s Topographies of Caribbean Writing, Race, and the

British Countryside for an analysis of black Britishness and rural Britain.

168

home too, just for a visit, test the water. Antigua, mon amour, we been away too

long, my darlin’” (282). Having finally made his flat in London into a home

where he can really belong, without concealing aspects of his identity, as he

formerly did, Barry is now ready to go back home to Antigua for a visit.

154

Barry’s sense of having finally achieved belonging through homemaking in

London is what allows him to contemplate traveling back home and exploring the

English countryside, for he knows that however far he ventures, his home in

London with Morris awaits his return.

Home, Alone: the Failure of Neoliberal Homemaking in Zadie Smith’s NW

As her author page aptly notes, Zadie Smith “burst spectacularly into view

with her debut novel,”

155

White Teeth (2000), followed by the novels The

Autograph Man (2002), On Beauty (2005), NW (2012), Swing Time (2016), and

most recently the story collection Grand Union (2019); Smith has also published

two essay collections, Changing My Mind (2009) and Feel Free (2018). Like

Evaristo, Smith has been the recipient of numerous book awards and is currently a

professor of creative writing.

156

Smith’s work been reviewed widely and largely

positively in major publications, and it is regularly the subject of academic

conferences, journal articles, and even dissertations. Throughout her career,

154

Had the novel been written post-Brexit, Barry likely would not have been as

sanguine about the prospect of traveling out of the UK, given the 2018 Windrush

passport scandal.

155

See Smith’s author page: http://www.zadiesmith.com/ accessed 9 Dec. 2019.

156

See Smith’s publisher’s author page:

www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/28946/zadie-smith, accessed 9 Dec.

2019, as well as her Wikipedia page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zadie_Smith,

accessed 9 Dec. 2019.

169

however, Smith has been the poster child for literary multiculturalism, leading to

critiques that her success is due more to her marketability as an author than the

quality of her writing, and that the attention she attracts overshadows other writers

of color.

157

It is a gross understatement to say that reviews of NW diverge widely.

Michiko Kakutani, the influential New York Times reviewer, found the book

“clunky,” lacking “insight or finesse,”

158

and expressed the desire for Smith to

keep churning out novels like her debut. By contrast, other reviewers praised

Smith’s “insight and compassion,”

159

describing the book as a “wildly ambitious

[…] novel,” driven by its “engaging” and “incisive” authorial voice.

160

Formally,

NW also confounded readers, some of whom read it as a realist “urban novel

depicting a vibrant, volatile multicultural world,”

161

while others saw it as “anti-

realis[t],” driven by “existentialist intentions” that manifest in “effective[…]

formal experimentations.”

162

Unlike Mr. Loverman, in which Barry’s first-person voice dominates the

novel, often talking over Carmel’s subterranean second-person narrative, NW

represents its characters and their milieu as fragmented, their interconnectedness

incomplete and unnoticed by themselves. While Evaristo’s novel charts the

157

For example, see Okojie, who argues that the way that Smith is championed by

the mainstream press blocks other writers of color from publication or media

attention; and Palmer, who provides a more nuanced critique of Smith’s

marketability as an emblem of multiculturalism (a term, Palmer notes, that Smith

herself dislikes).

158

Kakutani.

159

Fischer, Women’s Review of Books.

160

Kirkus reviews 15 Aug 2012.

161

Seaman; see also Thomson, and Sieff.

162

Van der Akker; see also Webb.

170

upward mobility of Barry (and his family), concluding with Barry and Morris

driving off into the sunset together, the various plots in Smith’s novel remain

unresolved and the futures of most of its characters uncertain. By employing these

narrative strategies in NW, Smith turns away from the convenient arc of progress

that Evaristo’s novel describes. Instead, she represents how inhabiting the

physical location of place intersects with the various social positions of race,

class, and gender that particular characters occupy, thus informing their

differential access to social mobility and belonging. Named after the London

postcode in which its events are primarily set, Smith’s NW is divided in five

sections, each with its own internal formal structure. The first section,

“Visitation,” is written from the close third person perspective of Leah Hanwell, a

thirty-something white woman who has grown up on the public housing estates,

and now leases a council house with her husband, Michel. The second section,

“Guest,” is written from the close third person perspective of Felix Cooper, a

thirty-something black man whose parents were anti-racism activists during his

childhood, and who, after a period of drug use in his teens and twenties, is now

invested in self-improvement. The remaining sections, “Host,” “Crossing,” and

“Visitation,” take on the close third person perspective of Natalie Blake,

originally named Keisha, who initially appears in the first section as Leah’s best

friend, but who comes to dominate the second half of the novel; like Leah, Natalie

has grown up in public housing, but has gone on to university and become a

successful corporate lawyer, and married Frank DeAngelis, a wealthy man of

Trinidadian-Italian parentage.

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I focus primarily on the character of Natalie/Keisha, as a black British

neoliberal subject attempting to achieve national belonging through property

ownership. I also briefly comment on Felix’s less successful endeavors to become

a neoliberal subject of value as well, as his difficulty in realizing that goal, and his

violent death, are essential correctives to the illusion of upward mobility and the

myth of colorblind society that characterize neoliberal rhetoric. Where Evaristo

foregrounds Barry’s individual achievements in becoming a subject of value in

her use of the first person and in the title of her novel, Smith emphasizes the

importance of place and interpersonal relationships in the form and content of her

book. The subsections that comprise NW position homemaking as a central theme

by invoking hospitality and belonging as relationships between and amongst

characters, rather than as something that can be achieved in isolation. Smith thus

engages with the idea of boundaries and boundary-crossing that underlie

conceptions and practices of being metaphorically, and literally, “at home.”

Like Barry’s, Natalie’s marriage, too, provides her with the capital to

purchase a home; but unlike Barry, profit is not her primary motive in pursuing

homeownership. In NW, it is the desire for class mobility, and in particular the

concern with middleclass achievement – the twenty-first century iteration of

“respectability” as the quality that marks subjects’ social worth –that is at the

heart of property ownership. Where characters like Adella and Hortense strove to

become married homeowners and homemakers in order to avoid social censure

and conform to patriarchal regulation of women’s sexuality, Natalie seeks to leave

her working-class childhood behind and join her wealthy husband’s upper

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middleclass milieu in order to prove that she is a successful and productive

member of the neoliberal professional class, rather than a “burden” on the state.

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But even if Natalie is not trying to profit from property ownership the way that

Barry does, marriage performs a similar function in Evaristo’s and Smith’s

novels. In both, it is marriage that allows characters from working class

backgrounds to access capital through such socially-sanctioned alliances: when

Natalie buys her house with Frank, his wealth, from his mother’s Italian oven-

manufacturing family, makes their house purchase possible. Though Natalie and

Frank also have financial assets acquired through their own work, their ability to

access the high-paying employment that then enables them to buy their house

derives from family connections as much as it does through their own efforts,

particularly in Frank’s case. It is Frank’s family connections and wealth that

provide his privileged education and lucrative employment, which in turn leads to

his meeting Natalie; subsequently, his mother pays Natalie’s pupilage fees during

her legal training, thus allowing her to progress without further debt. Where

Evaristo’s novel depicts the working-class Barry leveraging his wife’s bourgeois

family connections in Antigua in order to profit from property and become upper

middle class, Smith’s novel shows Natalie leveraging her success in the university

system as a way to escape her working-class childhood, which the purchase of the

house emblematizes. Though their particulars diverge, both novels illustrate how

property ownership is enabled by marital capital, which allows their protagonists

to distance themselves from their working class origins.

163

See Curran, 72, and Overton and O’Mahony, 64, for examples of how

benefits-recipients are framed as undeserving social “burdens.”

173

Smith is quite explicit in representing marriage not only as an economic

institution that consolidates and transmits privilege, but one that continues to

operate within rigid and stereotyped boundaries of the male provider and female

homemaker (or gold digger). In subsection 106, “Parklife,” she represents the

genesis of Natalie and Frank’s relationship using the genre of the personal ad, a

form that explicitly encourages the commodification and marketing of the self:

Female individual seeks male individual for loving relationship.

And vice versa.

Low-status person with intellectual capital but no surplus wealth

seeks high-status person of substantial surplus wealth for

enjoyment of mutual advantages, including longer life expectancy,

better nutrition, fewer working hours and earlier retirement, among

other benefits.

Human animal in need of food and shelter seeks human animal of

opposite gender to provide her with offspring and remain with her

until the independent survival of aforementioned offspring (Smith,

270).

With each of the three sentences, Smith’s language moves further away from

idealized and romanticized love, to expose the pragmatic self-interest that

underlies it. Unlike the humorous tone in which Evaristo writes Barry’s self-

congratulatory account of his own cleverness, NW’s flat, emotionally detached

narrative voice strips away the conventional sentimentality that obscures the full

implication of Natalie’s decision to marry Frank from herself. The first sentence

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speaks only of gendered love and relationships, the ostensible discourse of

personal ads and marital love. The second sentence immediately draws up a

balance sheet of social and material advantages and disadvantages, and calculates

how Natalie and Frank might make up for each others’ deficits. The third sentence

takes this calculus even further, stripping away considerations of social

advantages and focusing on sheer physical survival, a framework that positions

humans as simply one type of animal, rather than a creature apart from them.

Smith’s adaptation of the personal ad genre reveals the artificiality of ideals of

romantic love: love is a scrim partially concealing the evaluation of social status,

and social status is a scrim for the material resources it enables people to access.

Like Barry, Natalie benefits materially from marriage, even though she positions

her success as the product of hard work. However, Natalie, as a woman charged

with the affective labor of homemaking, must deemphasize the material

advantage gained by her marriage that the narrative voice reveals; where Barry’s

bragging about his marital machinations comes across (in his mind, at least) as a

husband’s clever mastery of his wife, a similar attitude in Natalie would be

critiqued as evidence of gold-digging, and subject Natalie to censure. Gendered

expectations about men’s and women’s relationships to money and love shape

how Barry and Natalie are positioned with respect to marriage, which fuses

economic and affective ties and thus affects the way that they keep house and

home.

Though Natalie does not profit financially from owning property, like

Barry, property is the occasion and ground for expressing a particularized identity

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and for asserting social status. While giving her mother and Leah a tour of the

house, Natalie “recognize[s] in herself a need for total submission” when she

“encourage[s] her friend and her mother to stand in front of the bay window and

admire the view of the park” (Smith, 319). She is not simply sharing a beautiful

sight with people she loves; rather, she is using the bay window and the view of

the park it commands to communicate her possession of these privileged

amenities. The “original cornicing” and “working fireplace” (ibid.) similarly

signify Natalie’s ability to purchase social legitimacy in the form of antique

property. Much as Barry buys the spice warehouse flat for his daughter, Maxine,

and thus seeks to occupy a position of power in the narrative of British imperial

history, Natalie, too, seeks out architectural details that signify Britain’s past.

Though Natalie would not have occupied a privileged position during the era in

which the house was built, like Barry, she writes herself back into the history

from which she is otherwise excluded, believing that she can acquire social status

by owning property that connects her to Britain’s heyday of global dominance.

Smith presents Natalie’s upward mobility with some ambivalence as she

implicitly contrasts Natalie’s worldview of empowerment through equal-

opportunity materialism, with critiques of her part in enabling the perpetuation of

a social structure that continue to produce inequity. As Natalie “pick[s] at a piece

of loose plaster with her fingernail” (319), her focus on this flaw in her house

leads her to think about the flaws that others find in the work that has enabled her

to purchase it:

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When she had been a pupil and on the “wrong” side of a criminal

case, Marcia had urged her to “think of the victim’s family.” Now

if she was instructed by some large international company, she had

to listen to Leah’s self-righteous, ill-informed lectures about the

evils of globalization. Only Frank supported her […] They were

incorporated. An advert for themselves. Let me show you round

this advert for myself. Here is the window, here is the door. And

repeat, and repeat (319-320).

Turning away from the moral criticisms lodged by her mother and Leah without

addressing them, Natalie offers evidence of the success of her partnership with

Frank, as if that success in itself constitutes a moral endorsement of its worth. It is

not just that Frank’s and Natalie’s jobs provide them the income necessary to

afford a house that can testify to their social status. Rather, the house is an asset

that asserts their value as brand. Their marriage is a joint venture in which

coupledom is understood in the language of corporate enterprise. Natalie’s desire

to buy private property is, in part, motivated by the desire to distance herself from

the stigma of public housing: the purchase price is not “equivalent to […] a

particular arrangement of bricks and mortar”; rather, “[t]he money was for the

distance the house put between you and Caldwell” (300). The financial worth of

the house is taken to communicate the moral worth of its owners. The privileged

privacy of private property thus also has a public-facing side, in that it

communicates its owners’ social capital. But although the passage ends with

Natalie ultimately convincing herself of the rightness of her point of view, the

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way that Smith represents the trajectory of this train of thought incorporates a

critique of corporate ideology and its role in underwriting domestic space and the

family. The peeling plaster of the house that Natalie envisions as “an advert” for

her marriage to Frank metaphorically calls into question the solidity of that

relationship, and asks us to interrogate Natalie’s beliefs about the ability of

material possessions to testify to personal worth. When Natalie’s marriage falls

apart, following Frank’s discovery of her online sex life, Natalie sees the house

not as a symbol of their successful self-branding as a couple, but as “an expensive

pile of bricks and mortar” being dismantled in preparation for the arrival of “a

new arrangement of optimistic souls, intent on ‘building a life’ for themselves”

(391). Understanding family spatially, as an emotional structure to be built, and as

manifested in the material edifice of the house in which they live, reflects the

influence that material circumstances have on affective and social structures and

the relationships they cultivate or discourage. Both metaphorically and literally,

the house underwrites the venture of making family, which is implicitly

understood to be the only meaning of “building a life,” a construction that

validates middleclass dwelling patterns at while devaluing other social and spatial

arrangements.

Much as Evaristo represents access to private property, whether the home

or the pub, as dependent on financial capital, Smith likewise writes the

relationship between private and public space as mediated through performances

of consumption. Natalie and Frank give a dinner party that Leah and Michel

attend, at which they feel out of place amidst the other guests, professionals of a

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similar income level to their hosts. As they pass the “farm to table” spinach

(Smith, 97), and “heirloom tomato salad” (98), culinary signifiers of a slow-food,

farmers’ market alimentary culture that is both highly moralistic and strongly

classed,

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the guests express ideas that are also quite obviously classed and

premised on exclusion:

Solutions are passed across the table, strategies. Private wards.

Private cinemas. Christmas abroad. A restaurant with only five

tables in it. Security systems. Fences. The carriage of a 4x4 that

lets you sit alone above traffic. There is a perfect isolation out

there somewhere, you can get it, although it doesn’t come cheap

(98).

The “solutions” arrived at solve the problem of the presumably dangerous world

with purchased privatization. Safety is achieved through spatial isolation; it is a

lack of boundaries between oneself and others that creates danger. These solutions

are explicitly self-serving, interested in achieving a private security without any

concern for greater public welfare. The goal of “giv[ing] your individual child the

very best opportunities you can give them individually” (98) emerges as the

primary value; the facetious repetition of “individual” reveals the emptiness of a

supposedly irreproachable motive – enriching one’s own child – as a justification

for what is ultimately self-interest. Governmental solutions are not even broached;

rather, it is the market which the privileged dinner party guests presume to be the

only potential salvation from chaos and insecurity. Though they indulge in

164

See Srnicek and Williams, ch. 2, “Why Aren’t We Winning? A Critique of

Today’s Left,” and Hubbard, ch. 8: “Fast Food, Slow Food.”

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fantasies of environmental or geopolitical “apocalypse” and the imagined release

from “all this dull protection” (99), they ultimately hew to the market-driven

model of achievement that has created the lives that they lead today.

When Natalie does venture out from the privileged privacy of her house, it

is to engage in an equally privileged act of public consumption, namely, brunch:

Only the private realm existed now. Work and home. Marriage and

children. Now they only wanted to return to their own flats and

live the real life of domestic conversation and television and baths

and lunch and dinner. Brunch was outside the private realm, not by

much – it was just the other side of the border. But even brunch

was too far from home. Brunch didn’t really exist (299).

While Barry experiences public consumption in the gay pub as a chance to be

visible after years of enforced concealment, Natalie perceives brunch as more of a

chore than a privilege, and wishes to retreat into the private realm of family life.

Her conversation with Frank, and friends from university, Ameeta and Imran,

revolves around newspaper headlines, as they combine talk of war with gossip

about celebrities and friends, mixing topics as if they were of the same moral

value. In their university days, Natalie thought of joining Imran on a mission to

deliver aid to Bosnia; now, such political action has ceased as they have become

absorbed in domestic life. Smith suggests that the flattening of all world events to

the register of mere gossip results from a retreat into domestic space. Smith sets

up a parallel between work and home, marriage and children, in which the former

term produces the latter: work produces home; marriage produces children. As the

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dinner party scene also indicates, devoting resources to one’s children is the

primary aim of Natalie and her friends, and home is the arena in which this

activity takes place. Even going out for brunch, which demands only the most

superficial attention to other interests beyond the self and the private family unit,

seems somewhat unreal and a waste of time. It functions more as a semi-

obligatory performance of status rather than an experience undertaken for its own

sake (had the book been published after the advent of Instagram, no doubt Natalie

would be posting images of her avocado toast, or whatever has become the latest

status-signaling brunch dish of choice).

Smith illustrates how racial and ethnic identity can calcify into superficial

signifiers of diversity within a simplistic understanding of multiculturalism that

views it as an embrace and celebration of culture, and fails to contend with the

persistence of systemic social inequity or to interrogate the intersectional nature

of oppression. Natalie relieves herself from the need to think about politics or

public concerns outside the private realm by arguing that, when performed by her

racially and ethnically diverse group of friends in a privileged space, the act of

consumption is inherently political:

They were all four of them providing a service for the rest of the

people in the café, simply by being here. They were the “local

vibrancy” to which estate agents referred. For this reason, they

needn’t concern themselves too much with politics. They simply

were political facts, in their very persons (300).

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Natalie and her friends, as people of color, represent the ideal of multiculturalism

and mixed race communities that estate agents code as “local vibrancy.” Focusing

solely on their identities as people of color in the particular space they occupy

reflects a type of embodied politics that takes a superficial assessment of variety

in ethnic or racial identity as a sign that a given community has achieved the

social good of integration or multiculturalism. This ideal of racial diversity is

pernicious in several ways. Firstly, it turns people of color into features of the

environment, social amenities that others, namely, white people, can seek

proximity to in order to establish their own social worth as “tolerant” or

“inclusive,” in the language of multicultural morality. People of color thus

become instrumentalized, used as markers of white people’s moral goodness.

Secondly, the focus solely on race, to the exclusion of other differences, makes

invisible continued social inequality. Though Natalie and her friends are all

people of color, they are also all young, able-bodied, heterosexual professionals,

and, as such, are desirable residents of gentrifying neighborhoods, in ways that

others, particularly, in the real estate context, those of lower socioeconomic

status, are not. Natalie and her friends are the perfect residents for gentrifying

neighborhoods: their racial identities signal “diversity,” while their

socioeconomic status supports high property values. Smith’s dry critique of this

oversimplified form of embodied “politics” implicitly gestures toward the

political implications of the social realities that such a perspective ignores. By

viewing herself and her friends as inherently “political facts, in their very

persons,” Natalie releases herself from the need to take further political action,

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and can simply retreat into the private realm once she performs the minimally-

tasking duty of adding to the “local vibrancy” of the neighborhood at brunch.

Smith subtly critiques the values commodity culture, in which purchasing power

is equated with personal empowerment – that people of color have the resources

to brunch leisurely on the weekend is taken by Natalie as a sign of political

accomplishment – rather than interrogating the ethics of consumerism itself.

By contrast, Smith’s representation of the relationship between public

space and private property ownership is, in many ways, about the walling off of

the privileged in private spaces, as the dinner party and brunch scenes show. In

the section “Host,” where Natalie’s perspective first takes over the narrative, we

do not often see her in public spaces, other than a meeting with Leah in the park

and an encounter with her cousin, who appears much more comfortable in her

skin and her surroundings, and makes Natalie feel inadequate by comparison. A

notable exception to this is in scene where Natalie gets drawn into a confrontation

between some teenagers hanging out in a park, and the adults who want them to

stop smoking; the teens, and their interlocutors, identify themselves with the tube

stations nearest to their respective homes, as a way of signaling hyperlocal

belonging and street cred through the adoption of public infrastructure as part of

their sense of self. Natalie, by contrast, identifies herself with her profession as a

lawyer, using a different type of status signaling that is divorced from locality and

refers instead to channels of privilege.

Unlike Evaristo’s depiction of Barry walking through the city, a journey

that confirms his mastery over space as a property owner, Smith’s portrayal of

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Natalie walking through the city strips her of claims to property and belonging.

The relative absence of place in “Host” gives way as Smith foregrounds spatial

location in the subsequent section, “Crossing,” an extended sequence in which

Natalie leaves the house, following Frank’s discovery of her online sex life, and

goes on a drug-fueled odyssey through the housing estates with Nathan Bogle, a

former classmate who is now homeless and involved in crime. Unlike the

previous section, in which subsections are titled thematically, “Crossing” orients

the reader spatially, tracking Nathan and Natalie as they move from “Willesden

Lane to Kilburn High Road” followed by “Shoot Up Hill to Fortune Green,” and

so on throughout the city. This focus solely on location, as opposed to personal

ties, social networks, education, and cultural touchstones – some of the themes

that organize of the previous section – highlights the way that Natalie has left

behind attachments to the signifiers and systems that define her. At the end of

“Host,” Smith emphasizes how, in leaving the house without any signifiers of her

status as a private property owner, Natalie temporarily divests herself of social

capital, and even personal identity: “She saw her coat slung across the bannister,

keys and phone in the pocket […] on the hallway table she could see her purse, an

oyster card, another set of keys […] She walked out of the house with nothing and

closed the front door behind her” (354-5). All of these items serve to mark Natalie

as an upper middle class person with familial ties, whose financial assets allow

her to own property in the city and to move about it freely. But when Natalie

leaves the house without these guarantors of her social status, she no longer

inhabits the world as a successful corporate lawyer, wife, mother, and property

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owner. Stopping outside a crime scene where a crowd is gathered, Natalie asks a

police officer for information: “He looked down at her. A big T-shirt, leggings

and a pair of filthy red slippers, like a junkie […] She was no one. She didn’t

merit answering” (360). Without the coat, the keys, the purse, the phone, and all

the other socially situated signs of her access to property and proof of identity,

Natalie becomes a non-person in the eyes of the law, rather than a citizen:

“nothing more or less than the phenomenon of walking. She had no name, no

biography, no characteristics” (ibid). The identifying label of a name, the

biography that would list her achievements and link her relationally to others, and

the characteristics that others would attribute to her, have vanished in the absence

of the signs of class that Natalie has left at the house. Without the structure of the

house to frame her, or the possessions that link her to it, Natalie has been stripped

of the markers of self that render her a subject of value.

“Ain’t let me past the gate”: The Persistence of Race and the Limitations of

Neoliberal Self-Making

I conclude this chapter with a brief discussion of Felix Cooper, the

protagonist of the second section of NW, and Nathan Bogle, a childhood

classmate of Natalie and Leah’s who lives on the streets. Though Natalie and her

friend Leah do not know Felix personally, they recognize him as being local to

their neighborhood. Felix’s death is broadcast on the news at the end of the first

section of the novel, and the book concludes with Natalie and Leah calling in a tip

about his murder to the police. Felix’s death haunts the novel much as the spectral

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presence of Nathan Bogle, a heavy drug-user involved in crime, likely responsible

for Felix’s murder, also does. Felix and Nathan are both excluded from neoliberal

self-making, in that they are not property owners. In sharp contrast to Natalie and

Leah, who are frequently depicted in (sometimes, stuck in) their houses, neither

Felix nor Nathan have homes of their own: Felix, as the news coverage of his

death reports, grew up in “the notorious Garvey House project” (104), a collective

black activist house, and Nathan has been homeless for some time as a result of

his drug use. However, Felix, unlike Nathan, is trying to adhere to the dictates of

consumer capitalist self-improvement, and seems to believe that belonging under

neoliberalism is possible. While Nathan is only depicted outdoors or on public

transport, Felix is represented in the context of other people’s homes as he

traverses London on the last day of his life, going from his girlfriend, Grace’s flat,

to his father’s council flat, and then the apartment of his upper class ex-lover,

Annie. He has been clean and sober for a year, with steady employment and a

girlfriend, Grace, whom he lives with, thus ticking all the boxes for decent or

respectable working class subject. But Felix, intensely future-oriented, aspires for

something more. Breaking up with his upper class white lover, Annie, he chooses

movement over dwelling: “People can spend their whole lives just dwelling. I

could spend my whole life dwelling on some of the shit that’s happened to me. I

done that. Now it’s time for the next level. I’m moving up in the game. And I’m

ready for it” (181). Annie prophetically remarks that “Life’s not a video game,

Felix […] There isn’t actually any next level. The bad news is that everybody dies

at the end. Game over” (180), but Felix’s maintains his belief in the forward

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momentum premised on the promise of the future. Felix describes success

spatially, and failure as staying stuck in place.

Though Felix’s self-improvement aspirations have achieved concrete

results thus far, he also subscribes, somewhat, to the idea that one’s mindset and

attitude have consequential effects. Felix has imbibed the entrepreneurial mindset,

in its spiritualized, personal-empowerment form, from his girlfriend, Grace. This

philosophy combines business acumen and personal development, and includes

books with titles like Ten Secrets of Successful Leaders, new-age mantras like the

Serenity Prayer,

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and the belief in personal empowerment and responsibility:

“you just got to be the best that you can be. The rest will follow naturally […] The

personal is eternal” (151), as Felix earnestly explains his outlook on life. Though

he is skeptical of some aspects of the “spiritual” side of the philosophy of

personal empowerment – despite Grace’s urging, he “had not made a list of things

he wanted from the universe, and privately doubted it would change anything at

work” (115)

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– Felix subscribes to some of the notions that underlie neoliberal

self-making, such as the relentless quest for success and the onus of personal

responsibility.

Unfortunately, Annie’s reminder that “everybody dies in the end” comes

true when Felix is stabbed during a mugging. Leaving Annie’s, Felix feels himself

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A staple of new-age philosophy: “God grant me the serenity to accept the

things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to

know the difference” (150), in the variant that Felix recites.

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The belief in the ability to manifest one’s desires by petitioning a sentient

entity, here framed as “the universe,” in the right way, is referred to as “the law of

attraction” in new age and self-help discourse, a concept that has enjoyed

widespread uptake since its popularization in self-help author Rhonda Byrne’s

global bestseller The Secret (2006).

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to be free, and that he has lived up to Grace’s teachings: “The universe wants you

to be free. You must shake yourself free of the negative. The universe wants only

that you ask, so that you shall receive” (188). As Smith’s narrative makes clear,

however, Felix is not truly free to remake himself however he might desire. After

coming to the assistance of a pregnant white woman on the tube when two young

men will not remove their feet from the seats so that she can sit down, Felix is

confronted by the men once he gets off the train, and his good Samaritan act ends

up getting him murdered. It is not simply Felix’s personal choice to intervene that

leads to his death, however: the white woman approaches Felix because she

assumes that the man with his feet on the seat is a friend of Felix’s. Felix does not

know the two men, and Smith does not mark their race explicitly, but we can infer

from the way that the white woman interprets a relationship between Felix and the

men, and the fact that he addresses one of them as “blud” (193), a Rastafarian

term of familiarity, that they are also black. Felix is thus interpellated into a

relationship that he does not have through the white woman’s misreading of

shared race as an interpersonal relationship. The white woman’s mistake becomes

significant beyond its exemplification of the quotidian microagressions of

racialization: it ends up leading to Felix’s death. Affirmations and positive

thinking cannot control how people such as the woman on the train conscript him

into blackness, in ways that affect his very existence in a society suffused with

antiblack racism.

167

National belonging through homemaking or homeownership

167

Other examples of Felix being read through an antiblack racial lens include the

scene with Tom Mercer, a posh white guy buying a car from Felix, in which he

assumes that Felix will have access to weed; and the scene in which Felix sees a

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becomes difficult, if not impossible to access for individuals conscripted into

racial categories that not only inhibit belonging, but actively endanger people’s

lives. Homemaking as national belonging under antiblack racism reads not as

being about not domestic space, but domestic violence. Far from the universe

wanting him to be free, freedom and neoliberal self-making are ultimately

unachievable for Felix.

Ironically, it is Nathan Bogle, prime suspect for involvement in Felix’s

murder, who makes this point when he tells Natalie, “Everyone loves a bredrin

when he’s ten. After that he’s a problem […] Last time I was in your yard I was

ten, blud. Your mum ain’t let me past the gate after that, believe” (376). When

Natalie declares that he is free and exhorts him to be “responsible for [him]self,”

he argues “I ain’t free. Ain’t never been free” (382). Nathan explicitly rejects the

doctrine of neoliberal self-making and its foundational assumptions about the

equivalence and all people. By describing his unfreedom as spatial exclusion,

Nathan reinforces the metaphor of homemaking as national belonging by

articulating its absence.

Natalie, however, is not swayed from her belief in neoliberal upward

mobility. The novel ends with Natalie and Leah calling a police hotline to tip

them off about Nathan’s likely involvement in Felix’s death. Leah, who has been

existentially troubled by social inequity throughout the novel, asks Natalie why

they have succeeded while others, such as Nathan and Felix, have not. Despite her

child in a passing car, and only with difficulty “put[s] together the fearful child in

the passing reflection with what he knew of his own face” – a sharp contrast from

his view of himself as “a solid bloke, with his heart in the right place” (159).

189

own recent brush with existential despair, Natalie is uncompromising in her

answer: “Because we worked harder […] We were smarter and we knew we

didn’t want to end up begging on other people’s doorsteps. We wanted to get out.

People like Bogle – they didn’t want it enough” (400). Endorsing a meritocratic

worldview in which hard work yields achievement, Natalie justifies her own

success by asserting that her intentional efforts have produced deserved rewards,

while other people, less industrious, intelligent, and motivated, have fallen by the

wayside. However, Natalie’s thinking, as an adult, on self-motivation as the

source of success, contrasts sharply with her childhood reflection on her ability to

do schoolwork: “She wanted to read things […] She could sit in one place longer

than other children, be bored for hours without complaint […] She could not help

her mutated will – not more than she could help the shape of her feet or the street

on which she was born” (208). As a child, Natalie is aware that she receives

“praise” for what are “reflexive habits” (ibid.). It is not an intentional exercise of

willpower, but an accident of temperament – which Smith likens to the equally

random, yet consequential, accidents of her particular body and birthplace – that

sows the seeds of Natalie’s success in university later on. By the end of the novel

however, Natalie has forgotten about her admirably circumspect childhood

assessment of her own luck in enjoying the activities that provide her with social

rewards. As an adult, Natelie dismisses the importance of the myriad aspects of

context and circumstance that inform the trajectories of individuals’ lives, and

assumes that willpower and hard work are all that is required to produce the kind

of success she has achieved. Though the doctrine of neoliberal self-making

190

presumes that all subjects are equivalent and that their thoughts and will to

succeed are more salient than their life circumstances, Smith’s novel illustrates

that race and racism, especially for black men, continue to inhibit their ability to

become a subject of value.

Evaristo’s and Smith’s novels both position homemaking, through

property acquisition, as a metaphor for self-making. Their difference lies in the

way that they represent the relationship between the structure of the house and the

self. While both novels emphasize personal achievement and ambition –

meritocratic values privileged under neoliberalism – they also depict the

continued importance of heteronormative bourgeois institutions, namely marriage,

and chance, in determining their subjects’ ability to acquire property, though these

factors are downplayed in the narratives that their protagonists tell about

themselves. But though the novels share some similarities in their depiction of

how property is acquired, they differ in their depictions of the relationship

between property and self-making at a metaphorical level. In representing Barry’s

upward trajectory, Evaristo represents property ownership as a source of wealth

acquisition and self-expression that empowers Barry to confront the legacy of

British imperialism and homophobia. When he remodels his apartment after his

divorce, he divests himself of the social approval that his marriage provided, and

replaces his wife’s aesthetic mass-marketed trinkets, signifying the reach of

British imperial commerce, with his own aesthetic, replicating that of the colonial

master. When he buys a flat for his daughter that previously belonged to a white,

upper-class former lover, and which had once been a spice warehouse, she

191

transforms the space according to her own contemporary-art aesthetic, literally

glossing over history to make a space that represents her self, an opportunity that

Barry enables. In Evaristo’s novel, redecorating is form of self-expression, made

possible by property ownership; the choices made about how to present one’s

living space read as manifestos of the selves that live there. Property ownership

provides a theater for staging the self, and, conversely, lack of property ownership

renders self-expression inhibited or impossible.

By contrast, Smith’s novel depicts property acquisition as unstable and

unable to provide an arena for self-making. Unlike Barry, who finally can express

himself through redecoration when he gets divorced, for Natalie, divorce leads to

the crumbling of her home and sense of self as a married woman. The house she

has bought with Frank, once a status symbol that enabled them to throw dinner

parties and occupy a social position unavailable to black people in the era when

the house was built, becomes just “a pile of bricks and mortar.” Similarly,

Natalie’s sense of self becomes fragmented as she leaves the house and walks

through the streets with Nathan Bogle, seeing the places she once lived and

belonged. Rather than representing home ownership as an achievement that

enables self-expression, Smith depicts it as the very shaky foundation on which

interpersonal relationships are built. Their tenuousness, and the potential for

dissolution latent within them, rather than their stability or assurance of ongoing

prosperity and growth, is what Smith emphasizes in her depiction of property

ownership as the real site of, and as a metaphor for, self-making and interpersonal

relationships.

192

Conclusion

As my analysis of these novels shows, the way that homemaking has

figured as a recurring trope in black British novels has changed over time. Early

iterations of homemaking, such as those in Selvon’s Moses Ascending and Joan

Riley’s Waiting in the Twilight, present it as beset by obstacles, including

structural racism, patriarchy, and the physical disrepair of housing in post-WWII.

In these novels, the blockages to black British national belonging through

homemaking are explicit: antiblack racism is voiced openly, and used as a reason

to deny housing and access to loans. This first-generation of black British writers

who migrated to the UK as young adults do not express much hope for the

possibilities of homemaking as a way of achieving national belonging. Riley’s

Adella strives to become a homeowner as a means of gaining some freedom from

her dependence upon men for shelter. However, racist housing and banking

institutions in the UK deny her a formal mortgage, and offer her only dilapidated

buildings for purchase. Relegated to council housing, which she viewed as

disreputable and a sign of failure, Adella’s life ends with her yearning for

“respectability”—for her marriage, despite its brutality, and for a place she owns,

however dilapidated. Homeownership and homemaking, for Adella, are crucial to

achieving this respectability, which is her most treasured value. Of all the novels I

analyze, Riley’s most clearly (even didactically) illustrates the intersectionality of

raced, classed and gendered oppression that, in Adella’s case, converge and block

her efforts at achieving national belonging through homemaking.

193

Like Riley’s novel, Selvon’s Moses Ascending represents the failure of its

protagonist to achieve national belonging through, in this case, not so much

homemaking as homeownership. Though both Adella and Moses attempt to own

homes and fail in their efforts, the stakes in the two novels are very different, as

are the tones of their narratives. Both Moses and Adella lose control of their

houses, but unlike Adella, Selvon’s Moses knowingly leases a house doomed for

demolition. Rather than dying, he ends up back in the basement, the very location

he was seeking to escape. Where Adella sought to become a homeowner to

achieve respectability, Moses wants to become a landlord, a very specific kind of

class aspiration, as he imagines that this social status befits his aspirations as an

author. Imagining himself denying black tenants lodgings, Moses strives to mimic

the racist powers of exclusion to which he had been subjected. By repeatedly

showing Moses embodying the characteristics of the stereotypical conservative

white English property owner, Selvon lampoons this stock character, while

revealing how racial categories, rather than fear of invading “foreign” cultures,

are at the heart of British exclusion of people of color. Culturally, no one could be

more “English” than Moses; however, it is his race, rather than his pretensions of

English gentility, that lands him in jail as an agitator, alongside members of the

black activist group to which his friend Galahad belongs. Where Riley’s depiction

of Adella’s struggle to own her own home positions domestic space as the site

where ideologies of oppression are embodied, Selvon’s focus on Moses as a

landlord represents property as a tool for exercising state control and reproducing

racism.

194

Both Riley’s and Selvon’s novels express little hope for the possibility of

black British national belonging. Adella is continually defeated and dies, still

waiting, for a hospital room following a second stroke. Moses returns to the

basement, his hopes of being a landlord – and an author – foiled. These narratives

of failed belonging represent the social structures that impede black British

national belonging, while showing how their protagonists contend with the

impossibility of homemaking. Riley’s realistic representation of Adella’s doomed

struggles, and Selvon’s satirical depiction of Moses’ performance of Englishness,

are divergent strategies of engaging with the same basic sense of futility in facing

what Riley aptly describes as “a hostile environment.”

168

Writing at the same time as Riley, Phillips also reflects the hostility of his

contemporary environment in his treatment of the Windrush era. The Final

Passage presents the conditions for homemaking and homeownership in the UK

less bleakly than Riley’s novel does; nonetheless, Phillips’ England is an

inhospitable country for black immigrants. By ending the novel with Leila

yearning to go back home to live alongside her friend Millie, Phillips reveals the

inadequacies of both the nation and marriage as social institutions. Leila’s attempt

to achieve a sense of middleclass respectability differ somewhat from Adella’s

quest for respectability: Leila does not seem in danger of being exiled, shunned

and slandered the way that Adella had been throughout her life. Rather, Leila,

following her mother’ prescriptions for proper behavior, adheres to an aspirational

respectability in order to maintain the social privileges afforded to her for her

168

See Riley’s essay “Writing Reality in a Hostile Environment.”

195

light skin. Marriage to Michael, in a conventional ceremony, and performing her

duties as a housewife once in England, are the ways that Leila attempts to assert

her respectability as a form of social status. Though she does cook for him, we do

not often see Leila in the role of a housewife before the couple migrates, in part

because they are living in her mother’s house, and in part because Michael spends

most of his time at the bar with his friend Bradeth, or with Beverley, with whom

he has a child but whom he has not married. Once in England, however, where the

spatial and social isolation of the nuclear family unit intensifies the alienation

produced by racism, Leila realizes how empty this standard of respectability is,

and longs to go back home. Phillips astutely shows how the affiliative kinship

Leila enjoyed on the island is inhibited, even unavailable in England, both

because of racism of England and by the privatization of domestic space. Only by

leaving her marriage, England, and her shabby and unwelcoming flat does Leila

feel that she can be “at home.” Where Riley showed how women participate in

maintaining patriarchal structures in depicting Adella’s exile from Beaumont as

the source of her subsequent abuse and exploitation, as well as her unfulfilled

quest for respectability, Phillips emphasizes the importance of women’s

friendship as a source of strength in his depiction of Leila and Millie. By

representing Leila seeking home outside the structures of empire, privatized

domestic space, socially recognized kinship, and marriage, Phillips gestures

towards a powerful alternative to the hegemonic discourses that regulate national

belonging and homemaking.

196

Unlike Leila, Levy’s Hortense in Small Island wishes to participate in

national belonging and patriarchal domesticity. Viewing her light skin color and

middleclass upbringing as justification for national belonging in the UK, upon

arrival, Hortense discovers upon arrival that England – and her place in it – are

not as she imagined they would be. Fixated on reproducing the stereotypical

middleclass domesticity she has read about in books, Hortense is dismayed by the

inadequacy of the lodging-house room she and Gilbert occupy. Joined to her

idealized image of the house itself is her anticipation of congenial relations with

her neighbors; the failure of these relations to manifest, along with her inability to

be taken seriously as a teacher, are crushing evidence of racism that she had not

anticipated. But though Hortense’s idealized vision of middleclass English

domesticity is not actualized, she, unlike Leila, does not forsake this ideal. Rather,

she finally consummates her marriage and acquires a baby as she and Gilbert

begin to actualize their calling as homeowners. Where Phillips ends his novel

with the breakdown of conventional middleclass domesticity, marriage, and the

nuclear family, and gestures towards the end of pursuing national belonging in the

UK, Levy shows Hortense recommitting to all of these institutions, despite the

racism she has thus far experienced. Hortense’s intention to assert her right to

national belonging speaks, on the one hand, to her character’s fortitude, but it also

tacitly reaffirms the validity of these social institutions, despite their limitations.

As I argue in my reading of Small Island, knowledge of the ongoing struggle for

national belonging that black subjects faced in the decades following the

Windrush era complicates the novel’s superficially optimistic conclusion.

197

However, this paratextual reading is not necessarily demanded by the novel itself,

and Levy’s summation of plot events too easily leads naïve readers to the

conclusion that everything will certainly improve for Hortense now that she has

achieved the goal of homeownership, when the history of black British national

belonging was far less assured. Though Levy’s text hints at the possibility of an

historically-informed reading – as the final image of Hortense stiffening her spine

against the literally, and metaphorically, “cold” English climate suggests – a

complacent reading of the novel as the representation of past racism that has since

been overcome is all too likely.

Phillips and Levy’s novels thus represent the history of the foundational

Windrush origin story of black British national belonging very differently. Where

Phillips demonstrates how the failures to achieve national belonging through

dwelling live on in the present, Levy relegates the past to history, leading to the

conclusion that the struggles she represents have been overcome. From Phillips

perspective, during the height of Thatcherism, the persistence of racism was all

too apparent. By contrast, Levy’s novel, published after the official

commemoration of the Windrush arrival, and during New Labour’s active

embrace of multiculturalism, can be read in a celebratory mode if one approaches

its narrative of striving and achievement uncritically.

Published a decade after Small Island, Bernardine Evaristo’s Mr.

Loverman celebrates homeownership as the means of acheiving black British

national belonging to a far greater extent, and insists upon relegating racism to the

past. Evaristo presents the achievements of her protagonist, Barry, as a sign that

198

the Britain of the present, where a black, gay immigrant can become a wealthy

property owner, has replaced the racist, homophobic Britain of the past. Instances

of racism and homophobia in Evaristo’s novel all take place in the past, and are

referenced to provide contrast with the freedoms of the present day. However,

Evaristo’s conception of freedom is dependent upon the ability to acquire capital

as the foundation of financial security: Barry can only achieve national belonging

as a gay black man because of the real estate holdings he has amassed. It is these

financial resources, unavailable to most, which enable him to provide expensive

education for his children in upper-middleclass style; to participate in a

middleclass gay culture that revolves around consumption; and to divorce his wife

and move in with his long-time partner. Evaristo presents these developments as

if they are representative of social achievements, rather than indicative of the

perpetuation of earlier forms of institutional power: Barry acquires the capital to

buy his properties through his grocery-owning father-in-law, thus illustrating that

the bourgeois institutions of marriage and capital accumulation are what

underwrite his material and social success. The fact that Evaristo’s novel presents

material as social success reveals it to be an inherently neoliberal novel. Evaristo

goes beyond New Labour multiculturalism’s superficial celebration (and

commodification) of cultures to represent neoliberalism’s insistence on the

individual’s ability to transcend identity categories such as race; her postmodern

mixing of signifiers seems to delight in upending overly determined conceptions

of identity. But her often-hilarious tale of Barry’s success seems to imply that his

case is representative, and that racism and homophobia have been relegated to the

199

past, when in fact, it is Barry’s exceptional wealth that has produced a sense of

national belonging in the UK.

Smith takes a much more critical look at the neoliberal promise of national

belonging through property ownership. NW depicts property ownership as hollow

and unrewarding, and illustrates how privatization depoliticizes and isolates

individuals. Though her protagonist Natalie achieves the goals that assert her

social capital – university education; highly paid career; marriage; house – these

rewards prove to be unfulfilling. The house never becomes more than an inert

“pile of bricks and mortar” (Smith, 391), and Natalie’s achievements never

produce any feeling of belonging. Where Evaristo endorsed neoliberal self-

making in her depiction of Barry’s real estate acquisition as self-expression,

Smith continually emphasizes that Natalie’s successes are not the product of her

own efforts alone. Luck, rather than hard work and drive in and of themselves, is

a primary source of Natalie’s ability to navigate the institutions through which she

is eventually able to access financial and social capital. Though Natalie herself

sees her achievements as the product of personal effort, Smith repeatedly shows

that this alone does not account for her success. Smith’s representations of the

struggles faced by Felix Cooper and Nathan Bogle demonstrate how race and

class continue to position individuals at a disadvantage, and that not everyone will

be able to navigate these challenges as successfully as Natalie has. Natalie

mistakenly presumes that her exceptional achievements epitomize the logical

outcome of hard work, and that anyone who works hard will likewise be

rewarded. Smith, on the other hand, reveals the falseness of this meritocratic

200

ideology, illustrating how the rhetoric of personal achievement is designed to

overlook the persistence of inequitable institutional structures.

Taken together, these novels show how trope of homemaking as a

metaphor for black British national belonging has shifted from addressing flagrant

racism as the primary barrier to accessing housing in the twentieth century, to the

twenty-first century real estate landscape, in which wealth attainment is presented

as the key to freedom from the racism of previous decades. Representations of

black British national belonging via homemaking and homeownership began as a

way of contesting the inequities of empire, as the Windrush generation and their

descendants contended with white nationalism the rejection of black Britishness

and national belonging. Contemporary portrayals of black British homemaking

reveal how difficult it is to talk about racism and class in an era of intensifying

neoliberalism: race and class are supposed to be things of the past, and individual

will is positioned as the sole criterion for success (which is reduced to financial

acquisition). However, the 2016 Brexit vote, an event that occurred after the

publication of the novels discussed here, has brought such formerly unfashionable

concepts to light once again. Incidents such as the 2018 Windrush passport

scandal, in which individuals who had migrated to the UK on Commonwealth

passports were threatened with the revocation of citizenship, have shown that the

history of homemaking as national belonging discussed here is not a thing of the

past. Rather, the question of who can be “at home” in the UK has taken on

relevance once again, and will continue to be negotiated as the concept of black

British, and other, forms of national belonging continues to be contested.

201

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Home is where you feel a welcome: Homemaking as National Belonging in 20th and 21st c. Black British Novels PDF Free Download

Home is where you feel a welcome: Homemaking as National Belonging in 20th and 21st c. Black British Novels PDF free Download. Think more deeply and widely.

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